As we sink into the muck of what looks like a bad recession, the financial structuring geniuses and government leaders who enabled them keep doing a neat tap dance. They conveniently continue to blame a subprime-induced credit crunch for all this impending travail. Yes, financial gridlock has been caused by all those poor people who really couldn't afford homes in the first place and who shouldn't have taken out those subprime mortgages. Yes, it was poor people, striving for something beyond their limited means, who precipitated all those problems with highly leveraged bonds, backed by those bad subprime loans. And now, everyone is scared to invest in anything.
And then there is the solution, if we only can get liquidity back and get investors to start buying stocks again, and the bull market resumes, and we can start doing lots of deals with more cheap debt (thank you Fed for low interest rates), and make lots of fees from doing all those transactions, everything will be great again. It's the credit crunch, darn it the credit crunch.
It should only be so.
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Jonathan D. Miller
A marketing communication strategist who turned to real estate analysis, Jonathan D. Miller is a foremost interpreter of 21st citistate futures – cities and suburbs alike – seen through the lens of lifestyles and market realities. For more than 20 years (1992-2013), Miller authored Emerging Trends in Real Estate, the leading commercial real estate industry outlook report, published annually by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). He has lectures frequently on trends in real estate, including the future of America's major 24-hour urban centers and sprawling suburbs. He also has been author of ULI’s annual forecasts on infrastructure and its What’s Next? series of forecasts. On a weekly basis, he writes the Trendczar blog for GlobeStreet.com, the real estate news website. Outside his published forecasting work, Miller is a prominent communications/institutional investor-marketing strategist and partner in Miller Ryan LLC, helping corporate clients develop and execute branding and communications programs. He led the re-branding of GMAC Commercial Mortgage to Capmark Financial Group Inc. and he was part of the management team that helped build Equitable Real Estate Investment Management, Inc. (subsequently Lend Lease Real Estate Investments, Inc.) into the leading real estate advisor to pension funds and other real institutional investors. He joined the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S. in 1981, moving to Equitable Real Estate in 1984 as head of Corporate/Marketing Communications. In the 1980's he managed relations for several of the country's most prominent real estate developments including New York's Trump Tower and the Equitable Center. Earlier in his career, Miller was a reporter for Gannett Newspapers. He is a member of the Citistates Group and a board member of NYC Outward Bound Schools and the Center for Employment Opportunities.
