It's shocking and sobering if you're in CRE. Major federal bank regulatory Office of the Comptroller of the Currency made "confidential assessments" of 22 large banks it supervises, according to a Bloomberg report. Fully half lack an adequate grasp of and controls for many types of operational risk.

The lack of operational risk management in the largest banks is outside of bad loans or the potential for damaging market swings. The OCC looked at such threats as employee mistakes, legal problems, natural disasters, or tech weaknesses. These are things that can go wrong in how a bank undertakes day-to-day ordinary procedures, not with, for example, the quality of loans. And yet, the results could rebound indirectly on CRE.

That's because, in a bank, virtually every type of risk comes down to holding capital in reserve. "Banks have to show regulators plans for managing such risks, and they have to hold capital against those threats, a requirement that's long been debated because they're harder to measure than credit or market risks," Bloomberg wrote.