Commercial Real Estate

In the past year, we have extensively profiled the collapse of ground zero of Canada's oil industry as a result of the plunge in the price of oil. Since then it has only gotten far worse. As Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute points out, in a report from the Financial Post shows that Calgary in Alberta Canada now has 1.7 million square feet of empty office space, the most in North America with another 5.2 million under construction! But that's just the beginning, because for many recent millionaires, the real cash crunch has finally arrived which means business is thriving for at least one industry: pawn shops.

After years of moving lower, the past two quarters have seen a marked increase in Commercial & Industrial Nonperforming Loans.

Chinese investment in U.S. commercial real estate has changed over the past three years, and this has caused changes in the ownership of U.S. assets. It has changed even more over the past six months, and this means even bigger changes for U.S. industrial real estate.

After a lukewarm start by the Chinese "market", which had dropped for the past 6 out of 7 days despite ever escalating measures by Beijing to manipulate stocks higher, finally the Shanghai Composite reacted favorably to Chinese micromanagement of stock prices and closed 3.7% higher as Chinese regulators stepped up their latest measures by adjusting rules on short-selling in order to reduce trading frequency and price volatility, resulting in several large brokerages suspending short sell operations. At this pace only buy orders will soon be legal which just may send the farce of what was once a "market" limit up.

When we insist that markets are broken and the equities have been consigned to the gambling casinos, look no farther than today’s filing by Alpha Natural Resources. Markets, which were this wrong on a prominent name like ANRZ at the center of the global credit boom, did not make a one-time mistake; they are the mistake. As it now happens, the global credit boom is over; DM consumers are stranded at peak debt; and the China/EM investment frenzy is winding down rapidly. Now comes the tidal wave of global deflation...

"Mr. Jain created an environment by the physical and functional restructuring of the business GFFX division in the year 2005, involving also a change in the seating order of the trading floor in London which he initiated in which conflicts of interest between traders and submitters arose or were strengthened. There is suspicion that Mr. Jain might have knowingly made incorrect statements in his IBOR related Interview with the Deutsche Bundesbank."

"Mr. Jain created an environment by the physical and functional restructuring of the business GFFX division in the year 2005, involving also a change in the seating order of the trading floor in London which he initiated in which conflicts of interest between traders and submitters arose or were strengthened. There is suspicion that Mr. Jain might have knowingly made incorrect statements in his IBOR related Interview with the Deutsche Bundesbank."

A shocking and uncharacteristic display of common sense

Germany’s financial regulator says departing Deutsche Bank co-CEO Anshu Jain may have lied to the Bundesbank about LIBOR manipulation when he apparently denied having any knowledge of rumors that the fixes may have been fixed (so to speak) even as his inbox told a different story.

On the heels of resignations from co-CEOs Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, Deutsche Bank loses another high profile employee as the bank's global head of commercial real estate departs for Blackstone. Jonathan Pollack's departure comes just one month after the bank's head of structured finance Elad Shraga left to start his own fund and seems to lend credence to the idea that Deutsche Bank may be in trouble.  

No lesser establishment economist than Martin Feldstein - Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research - has some warning words of wisdom for The Fed today: "...the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies have also created dangerous risks to the financial sector and the economy as a whole." When even The Ivory Tower is losing faith, you know The Fed is in trouble...

JP Morgan’s massive silver buying brings to mind the Hunt Brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. The Texas oil-tycoons tried to corner the silver market by accumulating a massive silver futures position.  Ted Butler has estimated that JP Morgan may currently hold far more than their official figure of 55 million ounces.

Moments ago, General Electric showed why April is much more likley to be a rerun of February than January or March when it announceed that it would go ahead and repurchase half of the total record stock buybacks announced in February, or some $50 billion in what may be the largest stock buyback announcement in history! How will GE fund this massive distribution to its shareholders, of which the most concentrated one will once again be the biggest winners? Simple: by dumping the division that nearly caused its insolvency during the financial crisis, the hedge fund known as GE Capital. As part of the just announced mega transaction, GE announced an agreement to sell the bulk of the assets of GE Capital Real Estate to funds managed by Blackstone. Wells Fargo will acquire a portion of the performing loans at closing.

Current policy coming from the Fed seems to be geared to create a never-ending series of booms and busts, with the hope that the busts can be shortened with more debt and easy money. Yet one major driver behind the financial crisis in 2008 was too much debt - much of which led to taxpayer-funded bailouts. In spite of this, the best the Fed can come up with now is to lower interest rates to boost demand to induce households and governments to borrow even more. Interfering with interest rates, however, is by far the most damaging policy. The economy is not a car, and interest rates are not the gas pedal. Interest rates play a critical role in aligning output with society’s demand across time. Fiddling with them only creates an ever-growing misalignment between demand and supply across time requiring an ever larger and more painful adjustment.