Since Benghazi, and the false narrative put out by Obama and Hillary, I have been predicting that Benghazi would be the demise of her run for president, and it is Benghazi that led to uncovering of the emails. I obviously did not know about the secret server and deleted e mails, but it was clear there was a cover up to protect her and Obama from the incompetence that led to four Americans being murdered. Clearly Obama did not want any truth to emerge that his policies led to the dismantling of Libya into a terrorist state, and Hillary did not want the truth of her failure to provide needed security to ever emerge. They almost got away with the cover up, but in the end it is now coming out along with Hillary's much more extensive cover up of other matters by maintaining the secret server. We are just at the beginning of the unraveling of the Hillary campaign. While she might still run, she cannot win despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to anoint her. She has always been too stiff, too phony, too scripted and now too tired. That news conference about the e mails was so scripted and so stiff as to be a display of why she cannot be a successful candidate. She is not Bill who can charm most everyone. She has a record of total failure as Secretary of State and that record will look even worse as the US policy in the world continues to unravel. She cannot separate herself from Obama and his gross incompetence on foreign policy. She was the key player in that for four years.

So why does this matter. First, when the Republicans do assume the White House, there will be a massive policy changes in all sorts of areas that will benefit real estate. First and foremost we will have a completely new EPA. One that does not think it has a mandate to regulate every puddle and creek. Coal will no longer be outlawed, and climate change will be put back to reality of mainly being a natural phenomena that has been happening for millions of years. Costs of development will slowly be reduced as regulations are relaxed and eliminated where they make no sense. The false theory of disparate impact will hopefully go away and we can get back to dealing just with real discrimination and make believe discrimination. Oil will hopefully be allowed to be exported which will restart the growth of fracking and production and add tens of thousands of jobs, and at the same time keep oil prices low. Keystone will be approved, providing more jobs and development opportunities.

More importantly, there will be a chance possibly for corporate taxes to be reformed. While this may create some unfortunate reforms for real estate, it will make the US economy much better once the corporate rate is lowered to be competitive with the rest of the world. This will open new opportunities for development as the economy grows again. Maybe a large portion of the estimated $2.5 trillion that is harbored offshore will return to the US for investment.

More importantly, the public and consumers may once again feel the country is back on the right track to growth and jobs and consumers will spend a bit more. Right now only 29% of respondents think the US is on the right track. That does not bode well for consumption growth or housing sales. We also will get race relations back on track to being good before Holder and Obama set them back 30 years with their racial rhetoric which caused the deaths of two NYPD cops and the wounding of two other in Ferguson. If anything, Obama has made it much harder for another black to become president by emphasizing racial divide instead of ability and competence.

While we don't know who will be the next president, my guess is Walker and Rubio in one or the other combination. They are both young and vibrant, as opposed to Hillary who looks tired, stilted and getting old. She will be 70 or 71 if she wins, while the other two are young. She will not play so well to young voters compared to Walker and Rubio. Her campaign is clearly not well run given the e mail fiasco that is being so badly handled. If things do get really bad for Hillary and she drops out, and Warren is nominated, the Republicans win even bigger. She is so far left she is on the edge of reality. She still wants to kill the banks and Wall St and you developers, while the rest of the country has moved on and wants jobs. She will sell well to the takers, but not to the real job seekers.

The new Clinton scandal has just begun to unravel and get ugly. Nothing she said at the news conference was true and it is obvious there is a much bigger attempted cover up underway that is not going to go away.

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Joel Ross

Joel Ross began his career in Wall St as an investment banker in 1965, handling corporate advisory matters for a variety of clients. During the seventies he was CEO of North American operations for a UK based conglomerate, and sat on the parent company board. In 1981, he began his own firm handling leveraged buyouts, investment banking and real estate financing. In 1984 Ross began providing investment banking services and arranging financing for real estate transactions with his own firm, Ross Properties, Inc. In 1993 Ross and a partner, Lexington Mortgage, created the first Wall St hotel CMBS program in conjunction with Nomura. They went on to develop a similar CMBS program for another major Wall St investment bank and for five leading hotel companies. Lexington, in partnership with Mr. Ross established a hotel mortgage bank table funded by an investment bank, and making all CMBS hotel loans on their behalf. In 1999 he formed Citadel Realty Advisors as a successor to Ross Properties Corp., focusing on real estate investment banking in the US, UK and Paris. He has closed over $3.0 billion of financings for office, hotel, retail, land and multifamily projects. Ross is also a founder of Market Street Investors, a brownfield land development company, and has been involved in the acquisition of notes on defaulted loans and various REO assets in conjunction with several major investors. Ross was an adjunct professor in the graduate program at the NYU Hotel School. He is a member of Urban Land Institute and was a member of the leadership of his ULI council. In 1999, he conceived and co-authored with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Hotel Mortgage Performance Report, a major study of hotel mortgage default rates.