Archive - Dec 5, 2009 - Story

The "CRE-fail" news of the day comes from Chicago where Crains reports that Tishman Speyer has just defaulted on a major mezzanine loan, part of a $1.4 billion package of loans, in which the Federal Reserve is the the main lender via its Maiden Lane I program. Tishman-Speyer, whose 11 Chicago CRE holdings can be seen here, has allegedly defaulted on a mezz loan supporting 6 major commercial properties. The properties, 5.7 million sq. feet in total, represent roughly half of the CRE company's 12.2 million sq. feet of Chicago real estate. And while Tishman has enough of a real estate empire that this won't make a huge impact in the near term, what is notable about the portfolio is that the Fed itself is the holder of the mortgages, which it acquired as part of the Bear Stearns bailout and currently are part of the $26.4 billion in Maiden Lane I Assets. Even as this portfolio has been impaired by over $3.5 billion since inception, we fully expect the fully transparent Fed to have a public announcement as to just how much more value in ML 1 will be lost as a result of this default.

As you will no doubt be aware, a large portion of our energies here at Zero Hedge are devoted to developing new products and services for our readers. In this tradition, we are pleased today to announce a new partnership with Google.

On Wednesday Nov 25 2008, the dollar kissed its 2 year Nov 21 2007 two year anniversary low at 7450. 7450 was the 2007 year low, btw. I quickly scanned the headlines that day and sent a email memo detailing the uber-bearish headlines on the US dollar. The dollar was posting 14 yr lows in the yen. Russia was diversifying into Canadian Loonie, the Suissie rallied on news their CB would remove stimulus, the pound rallied on news the UK GDP was stronger than expected, the Aussie rallied too on news of a their reserve banks 3rd rate hike.

The Japanese posturing worked: with the yen hitting a 14 year high against the dollar, inside of 85, one short week ago, in the past 5 days the Yen staged a huge drop against the US currency, plunging by the most in over a decade, to 90.5 as of Friday close. While we are not sure what Hirohisa Fujii told Bernanke on the closed line in the past week, we do owe the boys at 33 Liberty a golf clap for managing the carry roll from the dollar to the yen with such efficacy that the stock market did not plunge. It appears the $ Plunge Enforcement Desk and the S&P Plunge Protection Desk have reached a phenomenal level of synergies.

Yields are much lower today and are trending down again despite the significant upward yield trend back then. So is this a genuine early economic recovery, or a sign that the modern stock market tends to be a capital-gain seeking momentum machine with little regard for underlying fundamentals? Yes, interest rates are low, but they were back then too, and David Rosenberg suggests most current corporate bond yields are a lot more attractive than yields of the same companies' stocks.