Live in Hope…Die in Despair! Will Interest Rates Come Down (Far Enough) This Year?

I sure hope they will. While I’m a member in good standing of the higher-for-longer club, I would love to be convinced that rates are coming down…a lot. I want to believe all those eminent and eminent-adjacent talking heads making…

This is just a short note, with little actual utility, but it’s about something that’s really bothering me. 

Why are we so calm?  What has anesthetized us? 

I’ve had numerous conversations with market-makers in and around our business and many, not all, but many, seem very relaxed about the here and now.  I hear:  Spreads…

Winter is surely coming.  One might hope it will arrive without the sorcery, murder, mayhem and intrigue of that memorable HBO show, but surely it will be freighted by its own quantum of trauma and anxiety.  Actually, what am I saying?  Winter is coming?  Winter is already here, but many have elected to not…

Several weeks ago, I wrote a commentary called Funny Times in which I bemoaned the complete lack of coherent data, making the process of predicting the course of interest rates, cap rates and transactional velocity over the next couple of quarters awfully hard.  This uncertainty, itself, contributes to a knock-on doom cycle sort of way…

I’ve written extensively about the CRE CLO technology for a long time and why it is the best leverage technology across securitization markets.  With the sponsor typically holding up to 20% of the bottom of the capital stack, it represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor.  For the sponsor, it provides unique…

What funny times in which we live; an observation perhaps highly dependent upon your notion of fun.  Maybe curious is the better description.  Daunting?  Frightening?  Opaque and unknowable?  All probably good descriptions.  True of politics.  True of business. 

Sticking to business, it’s hard to get conviction around anything right now.  Nonetheless, we must.  Everyone needs…

I wrote about the disconnect between our CRE CLO technology and the task at hand (finding acceptable lever in an expanding leverage desert) in my last commentary.  While the CRE CLO remains the best form of match-term, non-marked-to-market finance for portfolio lenders and represents the best alignment of interests between sponsor and investor across the…

CRE CLO technology is languishing in the toolbox.  A combination of high interest rates, a mispriced legacy book, an anxious investor base and no real need to refresh capital until borrowers start borrowing again is largely responsible.  When a tool just doesn’t work anymore, you don’t throw it away, you fix it.  I like this…

Conspiracy theory fans, tin-foil hat wearers everywhere, Nostradamus wannabes, the broadly unhinged and, of course, our professional purveyors of doom and gloom roosting on evening cable news see patterns where there are none, embrace straight-line projections based on disparate and unrelated data and loudly and often shrilly bleat that the end is nigh.  That’s all…