Comment on ‘Zombie Offices’ Spell Trouble for Some Banks - The New York Times
phillaholic@lemm.ee 8 months agoA collapse of the commercial real estate market would spill over to the larger market and most certainly impact any investments you have. We don’t really want banks to go under in big ways, it always ends up hurting the poor and middle class the most.
It’s not really a ‘could’ spill over, it definitely would.
A very high proportion of institutional investment is tied up in CRE. If enough defaults happen it might even be worse than 2008.
Doesn’t mean we should tip the scales in favor of CRE or the banks, though. If it comes to pass, we should nationalize the assets and socialize retirement (more). If we didn’t have all our retirement accounts in private markets our exposure to this kind of error wouldn’t be so high.
Yea I was being as neutral as possible in my answer. I agree it absolutely would be worse than 2008. I don’t think nationalizing the assets are going to work in this environment. The best we can hope for is regulation, but in the specific situation no one really did anything wrong. A Global pandemic flipped norms on their head.
but in the specific situation no one really did anything wrong
Banks invested in over-leveraged positions and lost liquidity, loosing their client’s savings. If they want the benefit of privatized banking and reap the profits, they should be prepared to accept the losses. I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion.
There could be individual banks over-leveraged in commercial real estate, but those aren’t important. At this scale it’s large enough to cause a a major recession or crash. We’ve seen smaller banks fail recently.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Given the overwhelming amount of debt the general public has, having the rich share the load and lose their shirts too would be nice. At this point there isn’t much left for us unmoneyed people and watching the system they rely on burn them as much as it hurts is is fine. Let the rich lose.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The really rich can loose more shirts than any of the rest of is will own in 10 lifetimes and not be meaningfully impacted. Not only do they have other shirts, when the fire gets put out they still have the capital from other places that they will use to buy up the pieces at rock bottom prices and profit throughout the rebuild. Outside of situations like the whole GameStop situation from a bit ago, you’re not going to screw over ultra rich people by having markets fail. Everyone else will suffer why they are mildly inconvenienced.