Rick Jones

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As I was saying in my last commentary, it’s time to stay calm and carry on in a market that is flashing green, red and yellow signals simultaneously.  These are market conditions in which nimbleness will be rewarded.  Whether the economy is going to continue to grow, albeit in a very low gear, or whether we’re going to have a recession of one species or another, things are not soon going to return to the BEFORE.
Continue Reading Get Ready for the Distressed Debt Wave (HONEST!)

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 are way better than ours… “Emergency biscuits flow into UK due to national shortages”)?
Continue Reading My Hair Is Not on Fire…Yet

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 a NASCAR pileup, whilst not being in one of the cars) the breathtaking collapse of Terra’s stablecoin. Having previously been entirely bereft of any knowledge of the topic, I read with considerable interest that the Terra coin was pegged to the dollar and backed by “algorithms.”  Algorithms?  The Terra peg was protected, theoretically (let’s emphasize that theoretical part) by allowing Terra’s owners to “burn” coins and buy another cryptocurrency which was designed not as something pegged to the dollar but as a repository of value which would rise and fall on market sentiment (backed by those marvelous algorithms again).  A shock absorber to protect the peg.  The companion cryptocurrency in this case was called Luna.  As Terra lost its peg, you would burn Terra and buy Luna.  And if Luna went down, you would burn Luna and buy Terra.  Apparently, this all worked as long as everyone firmly believed it worked.  Now, apparently, they don’t and it doesn’t.  Terra tanked to fractions of pennies on the dollar, as did Luna.  How’s that for a hedge?  Ouch!
Continue Reading Contagion

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 (how stupid does that sound?).  It’s only through the transmission mechanism of monetary change that our economy is really impacted and regrettably, we’ve got that in full right now in the form of rapid, material inflation.
Continue Reading It’s the Inflation, Stupid

Why I’m bothering to write about SOFR transition at this point is a bit of a mystery.  Hasn’t this topic now finally exhausted both our energy and interest?  Oh, and a European war is being fought as I write which, to say the least, renders the kerfuffle over LIBOR somewhat less than consequential.  But irrelevancy has not stopped me before.
Continue Reading SOFR:  The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships Was Photoshopped!

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

Just a few weeks back, I penned a sunny and optimistic piece about the growth of the CRE CLO market in 2022 and by implication, the general amicable economic conditions on which the growth of that technology would depend.  Being your basic risk-adverse type, I, of course, conditioned and limited my happy talk by excluding bad things that might proceed from disease, dictators and the Fed.

While I’m sticking by my predictions, my carve-outs seemed both more than a tad fainthearted and capacious enough to eat the proposition.…The Green Bay Packers will win the Super Bowl (by the way they will), assuming they get to the game and score more points than the other team.  Not really helpful, is it?Continue Reading Prognosticators’ Regret

Our fine little CRE CLO business has exploded over the past couple of years, hasn’t it?  Last year, around this time, I recklessly predicted for my friends at Commercial Mortgage Alert that we might hit $30 billion of issuance in 2021.   I was the outlier…by a lot.  Well, it looks like we’ll finish the year closer to $45 billion and it’s clear that in the first quarter of 2022 we will be on fire.  Now, of course, I also thought that we’d have a fantastic year in early 2020 and then that pesky little bug changed our lives, so please consider my on-fire prediction subject to caveats, limitations and restrictions including, but not limited to, disease, dictators and the possibility that the Fed is making a colossal mistake.

All else being equal, the CRE CLO business will continue to grow and I don’t really see the appetite for this technology receding any time soon.  Could it?  Sure.  Annoying black swans aside, if the curve radically changes shape and creates outsized demand for fixed rate product, the CRE CLO business, as it has grown up in the past couple of years, will see challenges.  But more on this later.Continue Reading The CRE CLO Unleashed