Rick Jones

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Richard D. Jones (“Rick”), co-chair of Dechert’s Finance and Real Estate group, focuses his practice on capital markets and mortgage finance. Mr. Jones was designated as a leading lawyer for real estate in the 2005-2009 editions of Chambers USA, a referral guide to leading lawyers in the United States based on the opinions of their clients and peers. Mr. Jones was described as “one of the savviest capital markets / mortgage finance lawyers in America’s real estate sector” in the 2007 edition of The Legal 500 (U.S.), which also named him one of New York’s top capital markets attorneys in its 2008 and 2009 editions. In addition he is listed in The Best Lawyers in America.

Mr. Jones recently received the Commercial Mortgage Securities Association’s (CMSA) Founders Award for his leadership. He has also received the Distinguished Service Award from the Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBA) which is given annually to one person who has provided sustained and effective leadership to the industry.

Mr. Jones is past president of the CRE Finance Council; a founder of the Commercial Real Estate Institute (CRI); a member and past governor of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and a former chair of its Capital Markets Committee; and a member of the Executive Committee of the Commercial Mortgage Board of Governors (COMBOG) of the MBA. Mr. Jones is a member of the Real Estate Roundtable, serving on its Capital and Credit Policy Advisory Committee. He also serves as the chairman of CRE Finance Council’s PAC as a member of the Commercial Real Estate Working Group of the Financial Services Roundtable, and on the MBA’s blue ribbon Council on Ensuring Mortgage Liquidity.

Mr. Jones is widely published and a frequent speaker on a wide range of issues affecting the capital markets and mortgage finance markets.

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CrunchedCredit Says Good-bye

By Rick Jones on Posted in Commercial Real Estate
I regret to inform you, my loyal readers and particularly those who regularly take the time to send me notes telling me I’m being ridiculous or agreeing with my dyspeptic bloviations, that CrunchedCredit is retired. I very much enjoyed writing CrunchedCredit these past 12 years and I truly appreciate my readership. As I write each … Continue Reading

Welcome to the New Normal – Funny Times Revisited

By Rick Jones on Posted in Commercial Real Estate, International Economies, Uncategorized
Several weeks ago, I wrote a commentary called Funny Times in which I bemoaned the complete lack of coherent data, making the process of predicting the course of interest rates, cap rates and transactional velocity over the next couple of quarters awfully hard.  This uncertainty, itself, contributes to a knock-on doom cycle sort of way … Continue Reading

The CRE CLO is Coming Back Soon:  Who You Gonna Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?

By Rick Jones on Posted in Commercial Real Estate, CRE CLO, CREFC
I’ve written extensively about the CRE CLO technology for a long time and why it is the best leverage technology across securitization markets.  With the sponsor typically holding up to 20% of the bottom of the capital stack, it represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor.  For the sponsor, it provides unique, … Continue Reading

Funny Times

By Rick Jones on Posted in CECL, COVID-19, International Economies, Opportunity Zones, Regulatory, Structured Finance
What funny times in which we live; an observation perhaps highly dependent upon your notion of fun.  Maybe curious is the better description.  Daunting?  Frightening?  Opaque and unknowable?  All probably good descriptions.  True of politics.  True of business.  Sticking to business, it’s hard to get conviction around anything right now.  Nonetheless, we must.  Everyone needs … Continue Reading

The CRE CLO Repurposed: Part II

By Rick Jones on Posted in CRE CLO, Liquidity
I wrote about the disconnect between our CRE CLO technology and the task at hand (finding acceptable lever in an expanding leverage desert) in my last commentary.  While the CRE CLO remains the best form of match-term, non-marked-to-market finance for portfolio lenders and represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor across the … Continue Reading

Fix the CRE CLO, Mr. Market:  Tear Down This Wall!

By Rick Jones on Posted in CRE CLO
CRE CLO technology is languishing in the toolbox.  A combination of high interest rates, a mispriced legacy book, an anxious investor base and no real need to refresh capital until borrowers start borrowing again is largely responsible.  When a tool just doesn’t work anymore, you don’t throw it away, you fix it.  I like this … Continue Reading

Sometimes, It Really Is a Duck: What If Things Are About to Go Bad?

By Rick Jones on Posted in Europe, International Economies, Real Estate, Regulatory, Uncategorized
Conspiracy theory fans, tin-foil hat wearers everywhere, Nostradamus wannabes, the broadly unhinged and, of course, our professional purveyors of doom and gloom roosting on evening cable news see patterns where there are none, embrace straight-line projections based on disparate and unrelated data and loudly and often shrilly bleat that the end is nigh.  That’s all … Continue Reading

Opportunities in a Time of Broken Banks

By Rick Jones on Posted in Credit Crisis
Well, it’s been an interesting week and a bit. First Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were closed by their respective State banking authorities with the FDIC stepping in as receiver and then the extraordinary action by the Fed and Treasury to address liquidity concerns and a bunch of rather disingenuous assurances from the great and … Continue Reading

The SEC As Bad Santa: The Proposed Securitization Conflict Rules

By Rick Jones and John Ludwig-Eagan on Posted in ABS, CMBS, CRE CLO, DechertOnPoint, Liquidity, Regulatory, Securitization
The current administration’s legislative initiatives are largely bottled up in a split Congress, so the path toward achieving the White House’s policy priorities runs almost exclusively through the executive order and rule-making process and boy, have they worked it hard.  But Santa is coming down the chimney delivering lumps of coal so often these days, … Continue Reading

Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Even Educated Fleas Do It.  Should The CRE Securitization Industry Advertise? [1]

By Rick Jones on Posted in Commercial Real Estate, CRE CLO, CREFC, CREFC Annual Conference
If the wisdom of crowds has any validity (and there’s no real evidence that it’s any worse than the pontifical huffings of the chattering class), then there’s hope for 2023.  Optimism did itself proud at CREFC.  We’ll see if that optimism is recapitulated at SFVegas and at the MBA CREF meeting coming up in the … Continue Reading

2022 Golden Turkeys

By Rick Jones on Posted in Climate Change, Commercial Real Estate, COVID-19, CRE CLO, Cryptocurrency, Golden Turkey Awards
It’s Golden Turkey Awards Time, Folks! Our Turkeys are a little late this year but hey, we’ve been busy worrying about the collapse of the world’s economy.  This is the 10th edition of our Turkeys and much thanks to our disorderly, often dysfunctional, regularly inscrutable and absurd government, polity and marketplace for continuing to provide … Continue Reading

Can We (Should We) Try to Fix the Conduit Before It’s Gone?

By Rick Jones on Posted in CRE CLO, Financial Reform, Risk Retention
The conduit market does not absorb a lot of bandwidth in my day-to-day practice; I’m more of a CRE/CLO/warehouse/SASB/new products/innovation sort of guy.  But it’s painful to watch this marquee capital markets product wither away, a product that  transformed $200 billion of mortgage loans into securities in a single year.  That biz might limp over … Continue Reading

Life (and Opportunity) in the Time of Considerable Government Malfeasance

By Rick Jones on Posted in CECL, Credit Crisis
I wrote a week or two back about my expectation that significant economic dislocation awaits us.  I still think that.  The morning after I published, hordes (ok, maybe not hordes) of PhD Villeins were outside my house with pitchforks and burning torches, loudly asserting that I had wildly overstated the likelihood of material distress in … Continue Reading

My Hair Is Not on Fire…Yet

By Rick Jones on Posted in International Economies
I’m back from vacation in the English countryside, away from the hurly burly of life in our capital markets.  While I tried hard not to obsess on the news whilst away, bad news has a way of slithering into your peripheral vision, doesn’t it (I stuck to the English papers which are great fun, and … Continue Reading

It’s Not Just a Flesh Wound

By Rick Jones on Posted in CREFC, CREFC Annual Conference
I’ve been back from CREFC’s and RER’s annual meetings for a week or so, mulling what those confabs meant.  There’s been plenty of reportage on the events, the panels, the parties, the to-ing and fro-ing, but what I want to do is step back and reflect on the gestalt; the subtext, the hidden codex.  What … Continue Reading

Contagion

By Rick Jones on Posted in Cryptocurrency
What I know about cryptocurrency can be inscribed on a head of pin with a jackhammer.  But I know it’s a thing; I know it’s a big thing and getting bigger.  So, these past few weeks I have been reading with interest (interest, to be clear in this context, is the emotion one experiences watching … Continue Reading

It’s the Inflation, Stupid

By Rick Jones on Posted in Financial Reform, Regulatory Complexity
We certainly have an abundance of bad bits and bobs out there right now, don’t we?  War, pestilence, chubby dictators with rockets, buff dictators without souls, miscellaneous threats to world peace.  It’s everywhere.  Nonetheless, my take remains (see my prior blog, Prognosticator’s Regret) that, at least for our economy, all that doesn’t matter so much … Continue Reading

The Coming Regulatory Deluge (With Apologies to Louis XV):  Smells Like Opportunity to Me

By Rick Jones on Posted in Financial Reform, Regulatory
Events keep happening that really do make it clear that we are about to enter a period of enhanced regulatory intrusion into the financial services space.  Shocking!  And entirely unexpected, right?  (You’re winning, sir)  While that is in many respects troubling, it’s also the stuff of opportunity for the creative and nimble.  I’ll explain.… Continue Reading
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