It’s our fault.  Well, if not entirely our fault, we certainly enabled it (you business types let this happen with nary a peep of protest).  What am I banging on about?  Legal documents.  The legal documents we use in mortgage finance and securitization are the most turgidly unreadable, repetitious, corpulent, elephantine abuses of the English language of which I…

Regular readers of this column may be aware that I have an arguably unhealthy fascination with black swans.  To quote the late Donald Rumsfeld, these known unknowns and unknown unknowns can be pesky…at best and pretty horrible at worst (he wasn’t as dumb as people thought he was, was he?).  

Black Swans and fat tails are…

It has worked its way into our cultural gestalt that every problem deserves a solution, created, crafted, implemented and enforced by our increasingly paternalistic government.  Our government, for its part, endlessly tells us that indeed, yes, it is the solution to…pretty much everything.  We, in the finance community writ large, are often the object of the government…

Things are looking pretty sweet out there right now, aren’t they?  The economy seems immune to all the handwringing over jobs and inflation.  The stock market is on fire.  The financial community, including but certainly not limited to the commercial real estate finance community, is doing cartwheels over the expectation that 2026 will be the year we’ve been…

There’s an awful lot of happy talk going around about 2026.  Apparently, that’s the year we were supposed to stay alive till.  I surely hope the talk is right, even if it doesn’t rhyme.  2025 was a pretty darn good year for commercial real estate but underperformed the “talk” in late 2024.  We like happy talk.  I keep seeing…

It’s that time of year again, time for me to give out the Golden Turkeys.  As usual, I wait until the Nobels are done so the Turkeys can get the attention that they deserve.  I’ve been in consultation with my editorial team, Hagrid and Hedwig, who are amazingly intuitive observers of the American experience, albeit they can…

Don’t you sometimes wonder what our gloriously elected leaders, our pontifical talking heads and all those sundry government officials, political wannabes and honorable this’s and thats actually think when they say what they say?^[1]

Jim Carey made a moderately successful movie called Liar, Liar back in 1997 in which for a day he could…