WASHINGTON, DC—More than 800 people convened at the JW Marriott hotel here for the CRE Finance Council’s Annual Conference, held over a three-day period ths week. Capital—where it’s coming from, where it’s going, its cost and potential impediments—was the topic du jour during the event, which attracted some of the biggest names in the commercial real estate financing arena.

One of the hottest sessions was the “Gauging European Sovereign Distress & Global Impact” panel. Speakers Matt Webster, global head of real estate finance for HSBC London; Steve Franck, a senior director with Alvarez & Marsal Europe; and Faisal Ashraf, Credit Suisse’s head of commercial real estate asset finance, were frank in their characterizations of the region and where it was headed. As Webster noted, even the strong players are impacted by the European crisis. “The difficulty is that while we may have avoided a lot of the problems in Europe, everyone else hasn’t.”

In fact, confidence is so poor that in the hardest-hit countries, customers are taking their money out of banks. If the crisis spreads, agreed the panelists, this will become a common occurrence.