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
Rick Jones
NIMBY Fails: A Black Swan Moves in Next Door
By Rick Jones on
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…
Not Every Problem Deserves a Solution And Not Every Solution is a Solution: That’s a Problem
By Rick Jones on
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…
Some Dystopic Thoughts for the New Year
By Rick Jones on
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…
If You’re Planning to Attend the Party, You Best Be Sure Interest Rates Are Coming Down
By Rick Jones on
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…
2025 Golden Turkeys
By Rick Jones on
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…
When the Residents of the Heights Talk, What Are They Really Thinking?
By Rick Jones on
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…
Direct Issuance: What’s Old Is New
By Rick Jones on
Back in the summer of 2017, I wrote, together with my partner, Stewart McQueen, a commentary entitled Direct Issuance is Here – A New Paradigm For Single Asset Single Borrower (SASB) Securitizations. Well, it wasn’t really here in the sense that it surely didn’t take off as a transformational innovation, albeit we have done a…
The Pancake REMIC Should Be a New Staple in the Pantry
By Rick Jones on
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…
A Wealth Tax Is Coming, But I’ve Got a Plan
By Rick Jones on
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…