D.C.-area developer Jeff Neal gives the Huffington Post Investigative Fund a tour of empty commercial properties just blocks from the Capitol. Hundreds of small and medium-sized banks are facing huge numbers of possible defaults by builders who erected thousands of office towers, condominiums and shopping centers with the easy credit available five years ago.

“Commercial real estate loans generally have terms of five to seven years. Many of the loans issued at the height of the credit bubble are coming due. By mid-November, $150 billion worth of commercial properties, about 7,500 in total, were in distress, according to Real Capital Analytics Research,” reported The Huffington Post. More than 400 banks are on a problem list maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, largely as a result of commercial debt.

Referring to the malaise of commercial real estate, Michael Stevens, senior vice president for regulatory policy at the

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Randall Forsyth (Barron’s): Synchronicity and stock prices, November 3, 2009. In a post-bubble world, equities move in sync with the cycle - worrying given the loss of momentum. As albert Edwards concludes, “the trend is your friend until it hits a bend. Beware, we may have just hit one.”

• Judy Chen (Bloomberg): Stiglitz says US is paying for failure to nationalize banks, November 2, 2009. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the world’s biggest economy is suffering because of the US government’s failure to nationalize banks during the financial crisis. “If we had done the right thing, we would be able to have more influence over the banks,” Stiglitz told reporters. “They would be lending and

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Vito Racanelli (Barron’s): The easy money has been made, November 2, 2009. The choppy action last week suggests the going gets much tougher from here. In a year in which the market has jumped far off its lows, the bull has so far talked the talk of earnings growth. It’s time to walk the walk.

• Edward Harrison (Credit Writedowns): Bullish data, recoveries, crashes and the psychology of forecasting redux, November 2, 2009. Is a double dip or crash a baseline scenario? No, not necessarily - but it is increasingly likely. So, as bullish as I believe the data are, I am more worried about a bad outcome, not less.

• Andy Kessler (The Wall Street Journal):

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Vito Racanelli (Barron’s): The easy money has been made, November 2, 2009. The choppy action last week suggests the going gets much tougher from here. In a year in which the market has jumped far off its lows, the bull has so far talked the talk of earnings growth. It’s time to walk the walk.

• Edward Harrison (Credit Writedowns): Bullish data, recoveries, crashes and the psychology of forecasting redux, November 2, 2009. Is a double dip or crash a baseline scenario? No, not necessarily - but it is increasingly likely. So, as bullish as I believe the data are, I am more worried about a bad outcome, not less.

• Andy Kessler (The Wall Street Journal):

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Joseph Stiglitz (The National Interest): Death cometh for the greenback, October 27, 2009. Whichever path we take, like it or not, we will be moving away from current arrangements, the dollar-reserve system. There are only two questions: will the movement away be orderly or disorderly, and will America play a part in shaping the new system that will emerge?

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Earnings likely to trend lower, October 27, 2009. Underpromising and overdelivering is the oldest game in the investor relations handbook, as earnings expectations are often cagily crafted by corporate managements. In turn, many Wall Street analysts, emulating Ralph Wanger’s zebras, follow that company guidance in adopting a herd mentality that morphs into a Wall

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find of interest.

• Robert Reich (The Huffington Post): Why the Dow is hitting 10,000 while everyone else is cutting back, September 22, 2009. So how can the Dow be flirting with 10,000 when consumers, who make up 70 percent of the economy, have had to cut way back on buying because they have no money? Jobs continue to disappear. One out of six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. Homes can no longer function as piggy banks because they’re worth almost a third less than they were two years ago. And for the first time in more than a decade, Americans are now having to pay down their debts and start to save.

• David Weidner (MarketWatch): The three

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Bearish arguments are roaring, September 14, 2009. In summary, the market has discounted favorable expectations (certainly against forecasts four months ago!) and seems more “certain” of a self-sustaining recovery cycle outcome. Reflecting the gravity and weight of so many inhibiting factors, I see a much broader range of possible outcomes and less certainty than some of the newly printed bullish market participants. The credit expansion of the last several decades has reversed, it will take time to reverse the damage to net worth and confidence, the consumer remains in a fragile state, corporations will make do with more productive but fewer personnel (job growth could continue to disappoint), there are no apparent drivers to replace the role of

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This post provides links to a number of thought-provoking articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find interesting.

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Conditional expectations and September seasonality, September 14, 2009. One of the arguments we’ve seen a lot lately is the idea that September and October have historically been the worst months for the stock market, coupled with rebuttals by bullish analysts along the lines that the discussion of this historical tendency by the bears makes it likely that nothing bad will happen this time. The fact is that yes, on average, the combined September-October period has historically produced slight declines for the S&P 500 whether you look back since 1870, 1900, 1940 or 1970. But the variance around that slightly negative return is large enough that it’s really misguided, in my view, to base predictions on it.

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Continuing our slog through the end of August, I have just published a book review of The Silence and the Scorpion by Brian Nelson over on Huffington Post, which makes a pretty good case that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez should be standing trial for having ordered his militias to fire upon unarmed crowds of protesters in the April 11th, 2002 events.

But why should an event that happened seven years ago continue to be so important today?  As Nelson explained to me in an extensive interview via email (the full transcript of which is posted here on my blog), how we understand the 2002 coup is seen as the ultimate proof or disproof of the regime's credibility.

"If you believe that the opposition initiated the violence; that they placed gunmen at the head of the march and wanted to cause deaths to spark

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“Is Sarah Palin secretly a beat poet? Do her words make little to no sense because she is so immersed in language and lyrics that she operates on a plane we cannot grasp? We sincerely doubt it, but that was the implication last night as William Shatner appeared on the ‘Tonight Show’ and read Sarah’s resignation speech in his typical Shatner way, with all the lilting and soft drum beats we’ve come to expect. It was quite magical,” reported The Huffington Post.

Source: The Huffington Post and YouTube, July 28, 2009.

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