Atlanta FED's Lockhart Says 2009 Year of CMBS Crash

Dennis Lockhart (not related to FHFA's much more clueless James), President of the Atlanta Fed and voting member of the Fed's policy-setting committee, had some surprisingly insightful commentary today, most notably recognizing that debt backing the commercial real estate market is doomed.

"Many banks are pretty heavily exposed to commercial real estate. It is also a big part of the securitization market. So commercial real estate is one that concerns me. Around $400 billion of commercial real estate refinancing was hanging over the market and [I am] monitoring its progress with care. If you think of 2007 and 2008, in a negative sense, as the year of...residential real estate issues, it is possible to think of 2009 as the year of commercial real estate. That is the one domestic factor that keeps me up at night," he told the Association for Financial Professionals after a speech. "We see very little risk of hyper-inflation, or serious inflation, in the short term. If anything, we're somewhat more concerned about the opposite," Lockhart told a questioner. "One of the requirements of the future, conceivably, as the economy recovers, will be the return to more conventional policy and shrinking of the Fed's balance sheet (and), conceivably, rate rises. You have to time that appropriately to ensure that we don't have a long-term inflation," Lockhart said.

In his prepared remarks, Lockhart stressed that the U.S. central bank had undertaken to use all the tools at its disposal to aid the economy, and he endorsed government action to boost bank balance sheets. "By injecting capital into banks, I believe the U.S. Treasury has strengthened and will further strengthen bank balance sheets. Economic forecasts will tend to be overly optimistic as the economy goes into a recession, but overly pessimistic as the economy comes out of recession and begins its expansion phase. Perhaps we should take some comfort from that," he said. Asked after the speech if he was confident that China would be able to boost domestic demand speedily, Lockhart made plain that he was not holding his breath for quick results from stimulus measures announced by Beijing. "Whether that is going to be possible in the short-term is a very debatable question. Because shifting from a high savings, low consumption society to a lower savings, higher consumption society in a short period of time can't easily be done," he said.