...

Jonathan Nachmani, a managing director with Madison Capital, a commercial real estate investment and finance firm, said hundreds of billions in office building loans were coming due in the next two years. He said banks hadn't been selling loans en masse because they didn't want to take losses and there wasn't enough interest from big investors.

"It's because nobody wants to touch office," said Mr. Nachmani, who oversees acquisitions for the firm.

...

Michael Hamilton, one of the heads of the real estate practice at O'Melveny & Myers, said he had been involved with a number of deals in which banks were quietly giving borrowers a year to find a buyer for a property -- even if it meant a building was sold at a substantial discount. He said that the banks were interested in avoiding a foreclosure and that borrowers benefited by getting to walk away from a mortgage without owing anything.

"What I have been seeing is the cockroaches are starting to come out," said Mr. Hamilton. "The general public does not have a sense of the severity of the problem."''

...

The state government isn't exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8 billion Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves. In a post on X the day he signed the bill, DeSantis called this "restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots."

...

the core of the I.R.S.'s position is that Mr. Trump's 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Mr. Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower's construction with his worthlessness deduction.

...

If the I.R.S. prevails, Mr. Trump's tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from "The Apprentice" and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the I.R.S. would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.

Well, of course Trump in effect generated a giant chunk of his latter-day fortune by harvesting bogus tax losses. On top of precedents such as the alleged tax dodges involved in the inheritance of his dad's estate, and the highly-questionable Seven Springs deductions, it's all likely par for the course for him. The only surprising thing is he might actually end up having to pay a big chunk of it back (apparently, only about half of the total value, since the IRS didn't react until tax year 2010, when it would have needed to go all the ways back to tax year 2008 to question the full breadth of the maneuver).

It's an idea so radical that in mainstream academic and financial circles, it borders on heresy -- the sort of thing that in the past only Turkey's populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the most zealous disciples of Modern Monetary Theory would dare utter publicly.

But the new converts -- along with a handful who confess to being at least curious about the idea -- say the economic evidence is becoming impossible to ignore.

...

This is, the contrarians argue, because the jump in benchmark rates from 0% to over 5% is providing Americans with a significant stream of income from their bond investments and savings accounts for the first time in two decades. "The reality is people have more money," says Kevin Muir, a former derivatives trader at RBC Capital Markets who now writes an investing newsletter called The MacroTourist.

...

Einhorn notes that US households receive income on more than $13 trillion of short-term interest-bearing assets, almost triple the $5 trillion in consumer debt, excluding mortgages, that they have to pay interest on. At today's rates, that translates to a net gain for households of some $400 billion a year, he estimates.

We would note also that present structural interest rates aren't actually "high" -- they're still historically a bit low (with the average prior to the QE era being around 6%). Money does need some time value for the economy to work properly, we've been saying around here for over 15 years...

We've suspected for a while that Jerome Powell secretly agrees with this stance, too.

(A final point, consumer interest rates have lost most coupling from the Funds rate and similar rates a long time ago. With usury laws buried, typical consumer credit card rates have been north of 22% for a long time. When the funds rate went up from 0% to 5%, these credit card rate levels bumped up to 25-30%. So what? That's just not a significant enough proportional change to make a difference. We just don't see many out there who would make different buying decisions on a 30% CC versus a 25% CC; and the population who would default at each rate level is probably the same. Therefore, overall, we would think that Einhorn's point about consumers ending up with more cash when structural interest rates go up as being on the balance, the prevailing factor.)

...

Yet Mr. Kelly of J.P. Morgan lists various reasons that periods of U.S. economic growth may be elongated and less chaotic going forward. Federal deposit insurance, introduced after the Depression, sharply reduced bank panics and failures. Vastly improved information on inventory levels among goods-producing businesses, he said, has "tamed" the inventory cycle, preventing mismatches between supply and demand that can cause mass layoffs.

...

[But] Mr. Herndon noted the work of the 20th-century Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who argued that business leaders feel "undermined" by the maintenance of full employment. Using their substantial influence over policy, Kalecki argued, they can help institute restrictive economic policies that bring times of economic expansion to an end and reset them with softer, more tolerable labor power.

And Mr. Herndon said he thought old-fashioned "bubble" manias and "credit cycles" remained a danger, too.

...

More than 50% of Black financial wealth is invested in pensions, the New York Fed found. Less than 20% of Black wealth is stored in private businesses, corporate equities, and mutual funds. In contrast, less than 30% of white financial wealth is invested in pensions, with about 50% invested in businesses, equities, and mutual funds.

"Black workers are still more likely to be unionized, which may play a part in the pension story," said Jones. "But how folks are exposed to the ability to invest in the stock market -- whether or not it's something they grow up doing -- we know that's different for white families than for people of color." Black family members are less likely to get an inheritance, she said.

During the pandemic, the real value of Black-held financial assets dropped in 2022 to below its 2019 level and continued to decline steadily, while the real value of Hispanic-held financial assets dipped below its 2019 level in 2022 and stagnated. Neither group's real financial assets have recovered to their 2019 values.

Owning a business is another component of financial wealth, and separate data show Black-owned businesses had a tougher time during the pandemic.

While less than 10% of all U.S. business owners are Black, Black-owned businesses were also more concentrated in industries hardest hit when COVID first spread, according to Economic Policy Institute analysis of government data. In April of 2020, more than 40% of Black business owners reported they were not working, compared with only 17% of white business owners.

The sustainable solution is to make it easier to build housing. That way we can actually start heading in the right direction with affordability and have that be sustainable and not just a short-term interest rate phenomenon," Daryl Fairweather, Redfin's chief economist, told CNN