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 sad little dash at the top), anyone who was hoping for clarity and a plan to go to the bank on, is either disappointed… or perhaps relieved.
Continue Reading Have Yourself a Very Trumpy Tax Plan
Reading the Financial Tea Leaves: CREFC Market Outlook Survey 2017
CREFC has surveyed some of its attendees—all major participants in the commercial real estate finance industry—at the 2017 CRE Finance Council January Conference in Miami. CREFC’s 2017 market outlook survey confirmed what we observed at the conference this year, that for the most part survey respondents were cautiously optimistic in the face of the Trump Administration, Risk Retention and movement near the peak of the real estate cycle. We decided to dig a little deeper to see how this year’s survey responses differed from last year’s. Armed with the benefit of a little hindsight, let’s consider the year we had, the year we expected, and the year we’ve just begun.
Continue Reading Reading the Financial Tea Leaves: CREFC Market Outlook Survey 2017
Love (Financially Speaking) in the Time of Trump
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.
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A Report From the Risk Retention Front-Lines
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 create clarity and allow our business to pivot around this new set of rules so it can continue to thrive. I think all of us in the finance world are justifiably proud of the fact that if we are given a set of rules, we’ll figure out how to conduct business. But the uncertainty here is freezing everyone in place, a giant front court pick that we can’t seem to get around. But one thing is certain and that is that Christmas Eve is coming and with it this Rule will become effective. After having obsessed about the Risk Retention Rule for years now, we are broadly no closer to clarity about how one should play in the soon to be upon us risk retention world.
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Why Regulation Fails
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 of Law and the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, teaching securities laws. This is a great book and an important read. Paul argues cogently that:
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A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full
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 and regulation.
Continue Reading A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full
CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?
The slow start to 2016 did not dampen the enthusiasm at CREFC’s Annual Conference, held last week in New York City. The conference saw record attendance, with standing-room-only crowds at virtually every panel. As with the Industry Leaders Conference in January, the hot topics on people’s minds were risk retention (and the rest of the regulatory headwinds), liquidity and the competitiveness of the CMBS market.
The conference made very clear that we are at an inflection point in the current cycle. The general mood of the conference, in our view, was the confluence of nervousness and cautious optimism. The gloominess of the first quarter, and fears over the “sky is falling,” has yielded to mild bouts of enthusiasm (at least if the parties were any indication). The capital markets have settled down over the past few months, spreads have tightened, and borrowers have begun to trickle back into the CMBS market.
Clearly our industry faces headwinds, and nobody is betting on a record second half, but we also did not hear anyone ringing the death knell for our business. We left the conference with more questions than answers. Here are some:Continue Reading CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?
Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum
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 Christmas Eve and applies to all transactions closed (priced?) after that date. The Rule, to generalize a bit, requires the sponsor of a securitization to retain a 5% vertical or horizontal strip with the additional possibility of laying off some or all of that risk onto a qualified B piece buyer or a mortgage loan originator. For more detail, please see our OnPoints, our risk retention briefing white papers and many, many back issues of this CrunchedCredit.
Here’s the headline in Muddville in May of 2017:
We As An Industry Are In Trouble.
We as an industry don’t have a scalable solution to the problem. We as an industry do not know what this will cost, who will pay for it, and to what extent this is an existential risk to CRE capital formation as it has been conducted for the past twenty-five years.Continue Reading Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum
The Regulatory State: May We Have A Little Humility, Please?
The Great Equity Correction of 2015 that is now being enjoyed by all of us is a correction, and not the beginning, of the Great Bear Market of 2015 (from my lips to God’s ears). It reminds me of just how little we know about how all complex systems, like the global financial market (and don’t get me started on climate), function. Nonetheless, our Regulatory State behaves as if this was not true and as if wise governmental types can simply declaim new rules and regulations to get their very specifically-designed outcomes.
Continue Reading The Regulatory State: May We Have A Little Humility, Please?
Europe and Its Common Currency: It’s Really Over… But Not Today
I’ve written about Europe a lot over the past couple of years and not out of just a Schadenfreude enjoyment of watching a slow motion disaster far from our shores but because it seems to me that really matters, both in terms of its impact on the global financial marketplace and the probable knock-on effect on domestic U.S. finance markets. It also deserves our attention because it contains lessons for all and sundry policymakers and opinion purveyors about policy choices that simply don’t work.
Of course, the first and most portentous mistake in Europe is don’t ever get into a land war in Southeast Asia, er, I mean never sever control of fiscal and monetary policy; in other words, their big mistake, the Euro-zone currency itself.
Until now, I have shied away from the conclusion that the center could not hold, and held firmly to the notion that somehow Europe would muddle through.
Continue Reading Europe and Its Common Currency: It’s Really Over… But Not Today