NEW YORK CITY-While the transaction market is expected to continue picking up over the next two years, panelists at yesterday’s “Investment and Finance Strategies for New Acquisitions and Development Today” conceded that enough is enough with the recovery chatter. As part of the Urban Land Institute’s “Real Estate Finance and Investment 2011” conference at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in Midtown Manhattan, participants from CBRE Capital Partners, Prudential Real Estate Investors, Dune Capital and Bank of America Merrill Lynch agreed that investors with money burning a hole in their pockets should cool it, for now, at least.

“We are in the same bubble that led to the last crash,” said Ethan Penner, president of CBRE Capital Partners, explaining that FED is leading the industry down the same troubled path that led to the downturn in the mid-2000s. “It’s incredible to me that we mistakenly believe that pumping untold amounts of liquidity into the market is the answer to the problem to get asset values up.”

Thursday’s discussion was a stark contrast from Wednesday’s “Private Equity Capital” ULI panel, where participants predicted that core assets and CMBS would lead the recovery, as reported by GlobeSt.com. Penner said that investors are taking “massive and imprudent risks” to deploy the capital to get the returns they need. “Most money in the world is retirement savings, and most retirement savings are predicated upon achieving a certain actuary return,” he said. “When the FED does what they are doing, it takes all that hard-earned money that wants, craves and needs lower risk profiles, and all of us will end up paying them back in the form of higher taxes. It’s just a sham.”