Hat tip Barry Ritholtz
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The long-coming commercial real estate bust has arrived in the U.S. and elsewhere, a result of sky-high prices met by a severe downturn.  Prices could only work in a best-case economic scenario and large busts are now coming (see my posts on Stuyvesant Town and Capmark Financial).
This bust is certainly another major impediment to [...]

Three years ago, MetLife agreed to sell the community of Stuyvesant Town (Peter Cooper Village) to Tishman Speyer and BlackRock for the exorbitant sum of $5.4 billion at the top the market. That deal has now gone completely pear-shaped and bankruptcy is expected soon in another bizarre chapter in the history of one of the [...]

A sign that the commercial real estate (CRE) market continues to cause headaches comes this weekend in the form of news of Capmark Financial’s imminent demise. Capmark is one of America’s largest commercial property lenders with about $10 billion in assets.
The New York Times’ Dealbook reports:
The Capmark Financial Group, the big commercial real estate finance [...]

The following post is from Stratfor via John Mauldin, who is a Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert. He is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore.

I think you will [...]

If you recall, at the end of May, I wrote a post “Both initial claims and continuing claims now pointing to recovery” that said jobless claims data were pointing to an imminent recovery.  The general gist of my argument was recovery would come by year’s end or early in 2010. But we needed to focus [...]

This is an astonishing video in China with Hugh Hendry, the money manager who is bearish on China who I profiled earlier this month.  In it, he shows us building after building after building – all of them massive and all of them empty.  And you see yet dozens of others still in construction in [...]

When you think about property, you should really be looking at its worth as the present value of future cash flow streams.  This is true for residential, commercial, rental or travel property.  One reason is that property is fungible, meaning what is a owner-occupied primary residence ca just as easily be a rental accommodation. It [...]

The first bank nationalization in German history is about to take place. At issue is Hypo Real Estate (HRE), a troubled Munich-based company that lends to commercial property developers and to build offices, hotels, roads, airports, you name it.
This issue has been building for nearly 7 months. Back in late September, just after Lehman [...]

The Bloomberg video below makes it seem that Whitney believes the stress tests are a sham. She says the tests are a theoretical exercise whereby banks ask: “what will our earnings power be in two years after we sell off these ‘toxic’ assets?” She goes on to suggest that the answer to this question [...]