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Toxic commercial real estate loans could create losses up to $100 billion for small and mid-size banks by the end of 2010 if the economy worsens.  According to a Wall Street Journal report – which applied the same criteria used by the federal government in its stress tests of 19 big banks — these institutions […]

Apple may be the Great American Company — the heir to the spirit of Henry Ford who revolutionized corporations worldwide by modernizing the assembly line to facilitate production of his legendary Model T car.  Similarly, Apple under Steve Jobs’ leadership expresses everything that Americans naturally do well — innovation, high quality, smart growth, and nimbleness. […]

Florida’s commercial real estate development community won big time in the Florida Legislature’s 2009 session with passage of the Community Renewal Act.  The legislation limits local governments’ ability to collect impact fees from developers, a step that is certain to encourage new commercial development in the Sunshine State. NAIOP Florida strongly supported the bill, which […]

Bank of America has pulled the plug on Chicago’s high-profile Waterview Tower with its filing of a foreclosure lawsuit against the 90-story condominium and hotel tower overlooking the Chicago River.  The bank has sued to collect $20 million from the developer, an affiliate of Chicago-based Teng & Associates, which stopped construction last year. The building’s […]

The opening of the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago spurred me to finally trek out to the other great piece of museum architecture in the Midwest, Santiago Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion, a sculptural addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum which opened in 2001, and cost approximately $121 million. The museum initially hired […]

It’s no surprise that investors are still wary of investing in derivatives, given the financial devastation that these vehicles’ collapse caused last year.  Proof of the fact is that the IPO of a financial instrument designed to be on American home prices failed because its auction did not generate adequate investor interest. According to its […]

Las Vegas may be in the middle of a desert, but right now it’s underwater.  Fully two-thirds of the once fast-growing city’s housing stock is underwater,  meaning that the owners owe more on their mortgages than the home is worth. According to www.zillow.com, borrowers who are underwater totaled 20.4 million at the end of the […]

Amidst the most dire financial crisis in a generation, Chicago has created a magnificent rejoinder to all the bad news.  The Russian writer Dostoevsky once said that “Beauty will save the world.”  Seeing Renzo Piano’s new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago makes you believe that it just might.  First of all, how […]

At a time when the CMBS market has contracted by 60 percent, a story that hasn’t gotten much attention is that fact that one slice of the securitized real estate market is doing phenomenally well. Ginnie Mae (the Government National Mortgage Association) has provided $124.18 billion of liquidity to the secondary mortgage-backed securities market during […]

$70 trillion dollars.  That’s all the money in the world, or to get technical, the subset of global savings known as fixed-income securities.  And it almost doubled from $36 trillion in just six years.  How did this happen? The Federal Reserve presided over the creation of what we have learned (the hard way) is a […]