Rick Jones

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Let me first apologize to my readership. I have been very dilatory in getting this commentary done and this topic is… a bit daunting. In my defense, working for a living can get in the way of thinking and writing. In any event, I have been doing some considerable reading about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues recently. It had not really been on my screen, in a big way, but has been bubbling along as a thing, important to some, but not so much for us denizens of the commercial real estate finance space.
Continue Reading We All Need Practice Spelling ESG

First, the ARRC, playing Charlton Heston, playing Moses, brings down from on high the ten commandments of SOFR and lo, we were sore afraid and with veneration, professed we had no God but SOFR.  A solution of sorts to a somewhat self-inflicted problem.  As we have observed before, we continue to think the solution to the problem of bankers diddling LIBOR is to punish bankers and shore up the system to make it more robust and not to blow up trillions of dollars of transactions and 40 years of precedent.  But that train has left the station.
Continue Reading LIBOR: First They Blinked and Now Some Hope, But a New Problem and It’s Big

Happy Inauguration Day (I hope).

Every turning of the year makes for a convenient point to look backwards, and of course, forward, but this year seems to actually denote some sort of inflection point and, as a card-carrying member of the blogosphere, I feel compelled to burden you with my views as to what the next year will hold for us all.  I am unburdened by anxiety or discomfiture in doing so, as the prediction business is one of asymmetrical risk and reward.  An anodyne exercise, I trust.  No one actually expects talking heads to be right, and no one remembers when you’re wrong; but in the blind cat finding a dead mouse type of way, if you are right, you get to annoyingly trumpet your breathtakingly erudite and accurate prediction over and over again for the rest of the year.

After predicting a terrific 2020 last January, how wrong could I be this time?
Continue Reading Elections Matter: My Dead Nuts Certain Guarantees for 2021

My, my, my! Another governmental red line looks to be breached; at least this time no one gets hurt. We, at CrunchedCredit, have in some sense been carrying the government’s water about LIBOR transitions. We have been talking about how to prepare for transition, how to move current loan production onto a sound non-LIBOR basis and how to address legacy assets. In other words, we had taken seriously the warnings of the FCA and the Fed, as well as others upon the regulatory heights who assured us that the LIBOR transition would arrive in early 2022. While we had heard stray musings from the regulatory establishment throughout, we all took on board the assurances from the regulatory doyens and rebroadcast their message, that everyone’s “central assumption” should be that they “cannot rely on LIBOR being published after the end of 2021.”

I gotta tell you, I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown with the government playing Lucy.Continue Reading LIBOR: They Blinked!

So, once again, time for Dechert’s acclaimed (at least by us) Annual Golden Turkey Awards.  It is rather a difficult time for comedy; we are in the throes of a completely unfunny pandemic.  Sitting down to finalize this year’s list gave me some sympathy for our late-night talk show hosts who are very publicly pining over the end of the Trump administration and trying to find humor in the anticipated Biden administration, where the watchword is “dull is cool.”  But perhaps looking for inanity and making gentle fun of it might even be more important in tough times than good.  So, with that in mind, we went digging for gems in 2020.  Nothing seems quite so risible as in past years, but here’s the best of a bad lot:Continue Reading 2020 Golden Turkey Awards

Timing is everything.  I published a piece two weeks ago on LIBOR transition to SOFR and suggested that folks get on with it and embrace this flawed but seemingly inevitable new SOFR index.  Writing that piece, I thought of as rather an exercise in self-care, I just had to get beyond my annoyance with SOFR and stop worrying about SOFR and embrace it with all its flaws and join the SOFR chorus.
Continue Reading Inexorably SOFR…But Hang On!

I wrote back in the early days of 2020, or as we call it now, the “Time Before,” that we thought it made sense for key market participants to consider an early move to SOFR pricing, not just as the backstop but as the interest rate of the loans.  Frankly, we were thinking about the SASB market, and we thought that would be indeed well received by the investor community.
Continue Reading It’s Time to Initiate a SOFR Loan…Or Maybe Not

I am trying to figure out how much I care, as a businessman (as opposed to an actual living, breathing human being), about the chaos swirling around us.  Every day’s news seems more the stuff of a dramatic conceit of someone’s next thriller than reality.  Throw in a car chase and some sex, and we’ve got a movie.  (The North Carolina sexting scandal doesn’t really get us there for this purpose.)
Continue Reading Inflection Point? How Much Change Are We Really Facing?

Folks, last week I made the point that it’s extremely important to confront negative narratives about our industry before they take hold, creep into the interstices between things that are true and then somehow ossified into received wisdom.  So, taking on board my own advice, which shockingly I find compelling, I want to sound the alarm about a recent Wall Street Journal story concerning the misstatement of net operating income in our industry (I only wish I could qualify as an influencer here.  I read about two teens with millions of followers this weekend; they talk about stuff like..their hair.  Is there anyone out there that wants to know about my hair?).
Continue Reading CMBS On The Perp Walk: We Are Being Set Up!