It wasn't that Mosler and his fellow "Resetting Investment Strategies" panelists necessarily ruled out the potential long-term effectiveness of the federal government's trillion-dollar efforts to stabilize and jump-start the economy. Tom Flexner, global head of real estate at Citigroup, noted that Wall Street hasn't been enthusiastic about the Obama administration's residential mortgage plan, but called it "absolutely a step in the right direction." He also gave a vote of confidence to the Treasury Department's newly launched TALF program, although to date it hasn't included the commercial sector. However, Flexner said the unprecedented size of the government's role in shaping the world in which commercial real estate will operate is also the primary source of the current uncertainty about what that world will look like.

Flexner charted two possible outcomes to the federal government's economic recovery program: it will lead to stabilization and will help the industry find the floor on pricing, or it will help create "a very severe environment" for the long haul. In the near term, he predicted that "we're going to reach a point of clarity in the market" over the next three to six months.

Along a similar timeline, Mosler told the audience that we'll see rents reach the bottom over the next six to nine months. That's also the time frame in which the effects of TARP will begin to make their way through the system, he said. If the markets correct themselves, office vacancy rates will peak at about 16%, compared to 20% to 25% in the trough of the 1980s.