You know, sometimes life’s problems smack you against the side of the head like a 2×4, and sometimes it’s just a multiplicity of middling offenses that become so annoying that you might just want to roll over and die. Think anything involving a conversation with the DMV or the phone company. Today, we’re talking the … Continue Reading
Well, we’ve had the big reveal and the administration’s new tax plan is out. This plan, announced with a great deal of fanfare, feels more like a campaign promise than an actual executable plan. At two hundred forty-six words from end to end (four different typesets, three different fonts, three colors, weird spacing and a … Continue Reading
The 2017 CREFC January Conference, which took place last week at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel, provided an opportunity for those in the commercial real estate finance industry to reflect on an eventful 2016, and look ahead to 2017. Although attendance was down by almost 11% this year (we’ll blame Zika), around 1,600 people attended … Continue Reading
This commentary is not customarily about politics, although those with a subtle cast of mind might get an inkling of some my personal views from my always dry and balanced language. However, right now, it’s hard not to think explicitly about politics and the new Trump administration.… Continue Reading
Your correspondent is fresh from the front-lines of the risk retention wars where great armies of lawyers, bankers and advisers are fixedly staring at each other, staring out of the redoubts of their respective defensive crouches in a complex, multidimensional chess game. All are fervently hoping against hope that something or someone does something to … Continue Reading
I’d like everyone to go out and buy a copy of Professor Paul Mahoney’s slender new book, Wasting a Crisis – Why Securities Regulation Fails. Paul is a brilliant guy. Until this spring, he was the dean of the University of Virginia School of Law where he is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor … Continue Reading
And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened). This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules … Continue Reading
We thought it would be useful to give a quick, interim update on the slow-motion train wreck that is our industry’s response to the upcoming effectiveness of the Risk Retention Rule. For those of you who have been blessedly snoozing under a rock these past couple of years, the Risk Retention Rule becomes effective on … Continue Reading
You know, there’s never a dull moment when one reports on the regulatory states’ endless and so often fruitless and wrong-headed tinkering with the global economy. So now… let’s talk bail-in. The bail-in regime, which was adopted by all European Union countries (other than Poland) and implemented on January 1, 2016 (European Economic Area (EEA) … Continue Reading
The referendum on whether the UK leaves the European Community is increasingly a Today issue. With a vote on June 23 the reality of a UK exit is getting harder to ignore.… Continue Reading
As we do each year at Crunched Credit, we take the end of a calendar year as an opportunity to stop and reflect on where we are, and what the next year might hold. Recognizing the certainty that a successful prediction is more a random event – a blind cat finding a dead mouse, than … Continue Reading
The way the new Basel III High Volatility Commercial Real Estate Lending Rule (HVCRE) was crafted, and is being enforced, is insane. We’ve written about this before. This is one of the purest examples of the regulatory apparatchik’s mule-headed refusal to look at data or engage with the banking establishment to develop thoughtful and effective … Continue Reading
For want of a baker, a job was lost. For want of a job, the economy was lost. For want of an economy, the banking system collapsed. For want of a banking system – well, ultimately Grexit. Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, (China), Grexit, Grexit. The Greeks will be fine, right? There is no … Continue Reading
Is the Federal Reserve overreaching by broadening the scope of its policies? If extremism in the defense of liberty is (reportedly) no vice, unremitting, continuous undisciplined chatter for the sake of transparency is no virtue. God knows transparency has become the sine qua non of public ethics these days. To be accused of not being … Continue Reading
We here at CrunchedCredit are getting ready, as we do each year at this time, to polish up the palantir and make our predictions and business projections about the coming year. While it can be a fun exercise, it’s actually serious business. To start with, you need a macro view of the geopolitical situation, the … Continue Reading
Who says that Europeans don’t get Halloween? After more than a year in the making, the European Central Bank (“ECB”) just finished its most recent stress test and found that pretty much everything was kinda OK. Sure, a few banks here and there in the nether regions flunked, but perhaps with the exception of that … Continue Reading
Have you heard the following thought expressed recently in one way or the another, “I’m less worried about what new black swans might swim onto our screens and more worried that we will just wake up one day, peer out of our bunker of habituated indifferences to the drumbeat of troubling news and decide, suddenly, … Continue Reading
Long ago and far away, a radio show gave birth to the catchphrase “Who know what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of men? The Shadow knows.” I think, although I’m not entirely certain at this point, that the Shadow was a good guy, but deeply misunderstood and viewed with enormous suspicion by more … Continue Reading
The Financial Times reported on April 2 that the Eurozone Banks continue to load up on sovereign debt; generally, the debt of their respective host countries. A few days later, the Financial Times reported a bevy of talking heads crowing over the end of the EC financial crisis. And then on April 16, the European … Continue Reading
Jens Weidmann, president of Deutsche Bundesbank, recently wrote a terrific piece in the Financial Times, making the point that the Faustian bargain between European sovereigns, their national banks, the ECB and EU policymakers to encourage European banks to gorge on sovereign debt may be politically attractive in the short run while being fundamentally a horrible … Continue Reading
I told the Blog team that I had sworn off writing about Europe for a while; but really. The FT opinionized last week that the EU ministerial decision to agree on a standard “bail-in” to fix broken European banks was a good thing. The editorial ended with a ringing endorsement “something is, however, better than … Continue Reading
I was entertaining myself early this morning by looking over a joint agency report just released entitled “An Analysis of the Impact of the Commercial Real Estate Concentration Guidance”. This report summarizes the performance of bank CRE portfolios following the issuance of interagency guidance in 2006 entitled “Concentrations in Commercial Real Estate Lending, Sound Risk … Continue Reading
What if LIBOR is disrupted? Something new to worry about, as if Europe’s slow motion financial train wreck, the U.S. elections, the fiscal cliff, the slowing U.S. economy, Mid-east tensions and uncertainty about the Asian economy aren’t enough. We now have a broken LIBOR to entertain us too!… Continue Reading
Several U.S. banking agencies recently approved a joint final rule, set to go into effect on January 1, 2013, regarding the amount of capital required under risk-based capital rules for banking organizations to cover market risk. The new rule aims to revise banking organizations’ internal modeling practices to better analyze and calculate their exposure to … Continue Reading
