Europe just seems to bounce from crisis to crisis. Just as the Greek crisis is shoved under the rug, in come the migrants. Much as these people need to be helped and cared for, there is no way Europe can just take in one million Muslims in a few weeks and think they can just be absorbed with no ripple effect. Even if all of the migrants are well educated, as many are, and hard working, there is a massive drain on the fiscal system to house, clothe, feed and care for one million new people who arrive with who knows what medical issues. They need to be permanently resettled into communities, and they are all Muslim going into Christian cultures. There is already a failure to assimilate problem is France, Holland and Belgium, and other places. Now they will add one million more culturally different, unemployed people who come from a vastly different political and cultural world. There has to be disruption of various sorts just to try to get these people acclimated. They lived in a violent world, where there was no real freedom, and mainly fear. That is a very hard transition, especially when they do not speak the local language and have a very different religion. None of this is a good thing for Europe.

Europe continued to struggle with excessive debt, a failure to restructure labor laws, failure to really clean up the bad loans on the books of the banks, excessive corruption in Greece and Italy, and dysfunction politically as we saw in the Greek crisis. Next up is the UK demanding changes to the Eurozone rules next year. The fact that Draghi now suggests there will another round of QE tells us that Europe is still fragile and the economy is far from recovery. Europe has a long way to go and could see real setbacks over the next couple of years as Putin stirs the pot even further.

Brazil and Venezuela are about to implode and take the rest of Latin America with them, China is going to cause much further pain for the emerging countries that lived off selling commodities, and they will continue to take over the South China Sea, Putin will continue to cause serious trouble as long as Obama is president and he knows he can get away with it, Obama's Iran deal is already creating new threats for Israel and they don't even have their $150 billion gift from Obama yet. Turkey is about to have a critical election pitting the Islamists against the secularists all while they battle the Kurds. The black swans are all over the world just waiting to land.

We are in the top of the ninth. It is a good time to be a seller. If you buy, you need to underwrite very carefully and be very disciplined in your underwriting.

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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.