Commercial Mortgages

It's always amazing to see the lengths Congress will go to in order to make things worse.

For one thing, despite the fact that subprime loans are not the major problem here, they are easy to report on as if they were (and, after all, can we expect reporters to notice houses that HAVEN'T been foreclosed on?).

I have to say, from a purely personal perspective, that what appears to be going on is that a lot of Wall Street types thought they were smarter than they actually were, and the numbers they ran didn't conform all that closely to the reality they wanted to describe. The repercussions are being felt in the commercial market, whose excellent loans were used to make portfolio products more attractive, with the result that investors are now being shy about securitized loans, knowing that the guys with water-cooled calculators will have put some bad loans in the woodpile.

What's doing well?

Well, there are still developers out there expanding, because the economy as a whole is absorbing new projects. I'm aware of projects in Central California and in Texas that are ongoing (and, since I know some of those developers, I'll stay mute about which should be snapped up by potential investors). I know that in an election year, people worry about illusory problems: it helps give the candidates something to talk about. We've had "outsourcing", and "a giant sucking sound in Mexico" and we'll probably have another in a quarter or so that people can get all in a lather about and that the successful candidate can claim s/he solved without doing much other than waving his/her hands.