One of the most consequential threats to our business is political volatility.  Newsflash?  Hardly.  It’s a threat hiding in plain sight.  We know it’s there; we even periodically dredge it up for a bit of worrying.  Nonetheless, our awareness of the damage that political diktat and policy volatility can cause seems to be muted, perhaps by its shear ubiquitousness.  A threat…

Having written hundreds of thousands of words of CrunchedCredit over the years, it’s possible I’m about to cross a bridge I already crossed long ago, but I thought it was a worthwhile topic in this time and place.  

It’s time we develop a structured warehouse facility for commercial real estate mortgages.  Structured warehouses could provide current…

^[1]Breathless headlines confront us daily about the perils of private credit.  A place where clueless investors’ equity goes to die and, more broadly, a threat to the safety of our capital markets.  Is it the plaything of villainous and rapacious chancers who act without regard to the equity stake of their investors feasting on AUM whilst…

I’ll admit up front to my luddite tendencies.  Technology and I are not the best of friends.  I sort of understand the argument about Crypto at a very superficial level.  Okay, I get the argument that Crypto is like gold; it’s expensive to make (mine) so becomes a storehouse of value because of its scarcity.  It’s backed by, hey…

If you want to get a preview of where the US is going there’s no better place to look than into the bubbling cauldron of UK politics.  Not to bury the lede, it’s bad for the country, bad for the economy and certainly bad for commercial real estate.  

Fragmentation and radicalization.  

In the UK, the Labor…

At the risk of appearing unduly churlish, I’m annoyed with our obsession with stress and anxiety these days.  So many seem to proudly complain bitterly about having to endure stress in everyday life.  “Not fair!…Why must I endure stress merely to achieve everything I want in life?  It should be easy.”  Sigh.  

The word “stress” appears millions of times…

If “It” is an event causing a riptide of damage to our economy, I don’t see anything horrific anytime soon, but that’s different than saying “we’re good.”  You’ve got to stay frosty.  We almost never notice “It” until we have been smacked up against the side of the head and wonder what the hell happened,  

A couple…

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…