Rick Jones

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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…

I’d like to direct your attention to my ex Dechert partner (he’s not ex, I am), Will Cejudo, and his recent OnPoint about the eponymously-titled Pancake REMIC.   (Regrettably, no one is paying me for this, I’ve got to figure out this influencer thing.  Nonetheless, Will is a brilliant tax lawyer and a business-friendly one who knows how to…

Have you been thinking about the wealth tax winds blowing across Europe?[1]  You should.  While weather here in the US certainly moves west to east, really bad statist-inspired policies seem to move east to west.  After all, Europe gave us the absolute monarch, utopian socialism, Marxism, nihilism, anarchism, theocracy, fascism and whatever the Russians are doing…

Doesn’t all the happy talk about the state of the commercial real estate economy seems a bit overdone?  Transactional volume is rebounding, asset prices coming back, cap rates stabilizing, interest rates coming down, spreads coming in, etc., etc…sunlit uplands as far as the eye can see.  There is a smaller rump of pessimists out there, wringing their…

I’m sure you know the allegory about the camel’s nose under the tent, right?  First it’s the nose, then it’s the humps.  A camel takes up a lot of room.  They’re smelly, they make an appalling din and while they may be useful in their way, they are not at all amiable company.  Pretty tough to do business with…

As I read through my last commentary on the future of the GSEs and fielded some comments from readers, I realized I glossed over hard questions about how the governmental backstop would work, sort of like envisioning a plane and assuming there’s an engine.  

Before I go on, let me reiterate what I said in…