Commentary on the Commercial Real Estate Debt Markets, Economics, Politics and More.
Mr. Pulte is now the great poohbah of Fannie and Freddie supervising the Twins from his seat at FHFA and also now acting as chair of their respective boards. What is he going to do (assuming he has any agency here)?
Among the tsunami of orders, presidential actions and findings ( I can, at least, get…
Have you noticed the explosion of adjectival (and adverbial) usage? President Trump, perhaps our Adjectiver-in-Chief, never says someone is doing his job, it’s always a fantastic job. No one in the White House is ever in discussions, they’re always in serious and important discussions (I suspect an impartial observer would conclude that there’s more than…
I just finished a book by Richard Overy called The Twilight Years analyzing the dying throes of the exceptionalism of the British Empire (American clerisy, please take note). There was a fascinating discussion about the peace movement in the UK between the wars and its impact on the collective psyche of the nation. That movement was robust…
The political adventure in self-abuse that we call an election is now well behind us. I planned to write this commentary last November, hence the “Just” in the title. My inability to even assay an answer to that question which would pass my relatively low standards for perspicacity has stayed my pen these several months. But now, it’s…
As regular readers of CrunchedCredit will know, I recently pitched the idea of amending our hoary old REMIC statute to allow additions of collateral after the startup date window to allow modification to performing loans (and to clarify any uncertainty about eligibility of PACE, CPACE and mezz debt). This commentary follows from a note I wrote…
This title may be a bit ambitious, a triumphalist embrace of hope over experience? But it’s time for the effort to be made.
With the help of my former colleagues at Dechert, notably Will Cejudo (me being the former, not him), we have proposed a new bill (need a catchy name…help, please) to amend the hoary…
Last week I talked about the Grand Bargain to fix our business. If we’re fixing to fix our business now, we’ve got to talk REMIC. The Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit (REMIC) created as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was an enormous boom to the commercial real estate industry. It facilitated the…
Let me begin with an apology for not being in print for a while. All that Ho-ho-ho-ing and a lot of mulling over this particular commentary is to blame. Today, with writer’s block behind me, this commentary is about acknowledging and considering addressing dysfunction in our industry.
The CRE securitization business never quite seems to reach robust…
Hello, All. The Golden Turkeys are back again – in my first post-Dechert effort. That means I have fewer folks to help me come up with brilliant ideas and even fewer folks to edit my really bad ideas. So, bear with me while I personally compile my list of things which annoy, amuse or confound me at CrunchedCredit…
I’ve been thinking recently about responsibility and intellectual courage. It started with my plumber (Note: Great title for my first novel): “It’s not my mistake and frankly, it’s the wells guy’s job” that reminded me of the line, apocryphally attributed to President Clinton, but actually (most) of the lyrics were from a 1968 hit by the Delphonics:
I…
