Archive - Dec 13, 2009 - Story

The government of Abu Dhabi and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates agreed to provide $10 billion to the Dubai Financial Support Fund, allowing Dubai World to repay $4.1 billion of Islamic sukuk bonds that are due today, the government of Dubai said in an e-mailed statement. Statement from Dubai Supreme Fiscal Committee attached.

Lately there has been much back and forth over the definitions of (un)employment, of improving (deteriorating) trends therein, and of just what is going on with the labor pool in the U.S. Due to the lack of a definitive data series that tracks comprehensive unemployment over time, the possibility for loose interpretation exists and is (ab)used by many. In order to hopefully mitigate a lot of the debate on the margin, here is probably one of the more comprehensive charts available, which tracks Initial Claims, Continuing Claims and Emergency Unemployment Compensation (the last being somewhat notorious lately, and a datapoint that has to be considered due to the skyrocketing exhaustion rate) since 1967. The result does not need much commentary.

"I Did Not Run For Office To Be Helping Out A Bunch Of Fat Cat Bankers On Wall Street. Some people on Wall Street still don't get it" - Barack Obama

Unfortunately, the people on Main Street get it, and at this point they can see right through your ever-escalating hypocrisy.

Continuing our series of impending Commercial Real Estate debacles, today we focus on CMBX 3 (H1 2007 transactions). As Fitch disclosed on Friday, the November delinquency rate across CMBS increased by 43 bps to 4.29%, while more than double, 9.16% of the entire Fitch universe, was in special servicing. Of this CMBX 3 (together with 4) hold the brunt of the collapse in CRE. Of the 25 deals in CMBX 3, those performing the worst as of the latest remittance report were:

• COMM 06-C8, with 18.3% of all deals delinquent or in special servicing ($680.4 million of $3.7 billion total)
• CSMC 07-C1, with 16.5% of all deals delinquent or in special servicing ($552.3 million of $3.3 billion total)
• LBUBS 07-C1, with 15.6% of all deals delinquent or in special servicing(576.4 million of $3.7 billion total)

And highlighted below are the properties most indicative of the CRE collapse within CMBX 3, and in CRE in general. Once again, this is merely a sample with many other properties already in foreclosure and/or delinquency.

Populist anger is starting to awake all over the world, as the G-20's actions continue favoring only the "aristocratic" banker class. We hope Berlusconi's mistresses will still find him just as attractive even with a black eye, bleeding lips and busted teeth.

With a charactersitic [sic] bout of nerve over wisdom, let me offer just one more reply:

What exactly are you arguing about here? Whether I'm a jerk or a tool? Is that even worthy of a single reply? Ok, don't answer that.

What would seem to be worth everyone's time is the focus on the issue raised by the essential disagrement between Rick and myself: are the jobs numbers improving or not and what is the right investment play relative to the direction of jobs and the economy?

-Steve Liesman