Rick Jones

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I had the opportunity to interview Sam Zell last week on an iGlobal podcast. You can see it here. Fascinating.  Okay, Mr. Zell might not be the undisputed master of 1.4 billion souls whose thoughts are obligatory reading, but his Thoughts should be accorded considerable weight by us denizens of the US economy.  There’s a real difference between those who bloviate for a living (which would include me) and those who actually deploy capital based on their views and analysis of markets.  I’ll pay considerably more attention to the latter.
Continue Reading The Thoughts of (Chairman) Zell

One of the pleasures of life is re-encountering old friends, catching up on what’s happened while your lives have gone their separate ways, reminiscing about the good old days and reconnecting.  It comes back so fast, it’s like you never were apart.

Me and the Liquidating Trust had just such an experience the other day.Continue Reading A Walk Down Memory Lane with the Liquidating Trust

COVID-19 has driven anxiety over the LIBOR transition right off almost everyone’s top-of-mind list and yet the crisis is taking no notice of that lack of regard and soldiering on.  The ARRC continues to beaver away, generating guidance and advice and otherwise proselytizing the need to get on with it and be ready for transition on January 1, 2022.

But are the markets listening?  Look at our ardor!  Except for special situations, the use of SOFR, to date, has been a political and not an economic decision for those who have elected to use it.  There is little take-up in the real world and little enthusiasm for doing so.  And what’s with the huge whoops a few weeks ago when SOFR’s March to the Sea was interrupted when the Fed backed off using SOFR in the Fed’s new $6 billion aid program for small and mid-size businesses?  Run away! Run away!  Back to LIBOR!Continue Reading LIBOR: The Monty Python Parrot of Finance

My last commentary, Playing with Broken Toys in Coronavirus Land, touched on the notion that sometimes following rules can guarantee a bad outcome.  I’ll leave more important musings about ethics and morality aside here (I still don’t have a clue about what Kant was nattering on about) and focus on the more mundane question of whether one should do what a contract says when the contract conflicts with the exercise of good judgment.
Continue Reading “I Was Just Following Orders”

I’ve been offline for a bit.  An amalgam of writer’s block caused by the enormity of the Coronavirus mess – what can be said that’s useful – and the consequence of being wildly busy as everyone across financial markets tries to pivot to the new reality.  Unburdened by any knowledge of science, medicine or epidemiology, I have been marinating in the output of such intellectually distinguished journals as The Sun, The Daily Beast, The Onion, The Mirror, The New York Post and Drudge on the daily ups and downs of our plague, its cost in blood and treasure and the disruption it has caused across all aspects of our life.  Consequently, I have opinions but I’ve concluded they’re pretty damn worthless.  We’re in uncharted waters, akin to those bits on a medieval map where the cartographers had no clue and wrote: “Here be Dragons.”
Continue Reading Playing with Broken Toys in Coronavirus Land

Here is something helpful that has surfaced amidst the fallout, pain and confusion of the global COVID-19 crisis.  The implementation date for the all-too-simple in theory but not-simple-at-all in practice CECL accounting standard has been pushed back by the passage of the CARES Act for banks until the COVID-19 national emergency declared by the president ends or December 31, 2020, whichever is earlier.  In addition, an interim final rule released by the FRB, OCC and FDIC on Friday, March 27th, now provides an option to delay the effects of CECL on regulatory capital for two years (in addition to the original three-year transition period for banks required to adopt CECL during their 2020 fiscal year).  Banks opting to use both forms of relief would be subject to a modified transition period which would be reduced by the amount of quarters CECL was delayed due to the CARES Act.  No relief was provided for non-banks who are otherwise required to follow CECL.
Continue Reading CECL: The Ugly Pig Running Out of Lipstick

Trigger Warning:  If any of you, my readers, or your senior management, who might actually read this, are card carrying members of the global elite, please be assured that I am only talking about other people here. 

This season of election insanity, where only big ideas packaged in often eye rolling tropes have their day (you don’t get elected by saying, “Vote for me and I will make a couple of small annoying things just a little bit better”) got me thinking about where all these big ideas came from.  They come from think tanks, academics, opinion makers and talking heads of all sorts, of course, or, as they would say, the global opinion elite.Continue Reading Beware of Global Elites Bearing Consensus

With apologies to Mr. Marquez for repurposing the title of his haunting book, it’s conference season here in CRE and ABS securitization-land and therefore a time to reflect (more Marquez) on the risks that the world will become more disorderly, or whether we will progress gently from a perfectly fine 2019 to 2020.  We attended CREFC in Miami, are currently attending MBA CREF in San Diego and SFA in Las Vegas (as mere vendors, we don’t get to go to Beaver Creek, more’s the pity). After having seen thousands of our best friends, we’ll have a pretty good sense of what the market thinks of 2020.  We’ve already published our outlook for the year, but now we test it against the wisdom of the crowd (or perhaps herd is closer to the mark).
Continue Reading Life in the Time of Conferences: CREFC, CREF and SFA

It is time to start originating Single Asset Single Borrower (SASB) large loans priced on SOFR.  There, I said it.  Not just LIBOR indexed loans containing a SOFR fall back when LIBOR inevitably goes away, but new loans indexed to Compounded SOFR, implementing all the necessary tweaks to documents, systems and processes to make that work now!
Continue Reading It’s Time to Originate a SOFR Loan! Really!

One of the good things about the 24/7 news cycle, perhaps one of its few positive externalities, is that it’s a boon for the pontification business. It enables all sorts of otherwise serious people to make fools of themselves day in and day out predicting generally gloomy stuff, as sunshine doesn’t sell.  As a card-carrying member of the chattering class, this empowers me to publish periodic outlooks about the future with little risk of any fundamental embarrassment.  It’s sort of a no risk undertaking, isn’t it?  If you happen to get something right (think blind cat finding dead mouse), you can claim to be a star.  If you get it wrong, well, everyone else got it wrong, too – and often on national television.

The other thing we’ve got going for us in the bloviating business is that we remain in fraught and friable times.  We are running short of good synonyms for shock and outrage and struggling to describe what might actually be viewed as extraordinary.  What really does extraordinary mean these days?  These make good times for the prediction biz.  It’s not much fun making predictions when not much changes.  Imagine that poor sod, talking to the Pharaoh during the Old Kingdom after reading many entrails,  I foresee…nothing really changing for 2000 years; more news at 11.

Unburdened by much of the way in data and little in the way of anxiety about getting it wrong, I’m ready to tell you all about 2020:Continue Reading 2020: An Outlook