Geithner Offers Irrelevant Solution to Coming Commercial Real Estate Crisis
Elizabeth Warren warned in February that commercial real estate was the next recovery-killer, and since nothing improved by March, Tim Geithner yesterday took to CNBC to acknowledge the problem with commercial real estate and push the administration’s program to incentivize small banks to lend to small businesses as the solution.
“„One way to help manage the commercial loan distress, Geithner said, is through the $30 billion fund proposed by President Barack Obama to provide money to midsize and community banks if they boost lending to small businesses.
He did not clarify how giving money to some banks for an entirely unrelated purpose would solve a commercial real estate crisis.
Earlier in the day, TARP Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren warned that more than half of commercial real estate would be underwater by the middle of 2010.
“„“They are [mostly] concentrated in the mid-sized banks,” Warren told CNBC. “We now have 2,988 banks—mostly midsized, that have these dangerous concentrations in commercial real estate lending.”
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In February, Warren noted that $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans would need to be refinanced between 2011 and 2014 when the shorter-term commercial real estate mortgages end, and a significant proportion of those are underwater already. More than $50 billion in commercial real estate mortgages are already in default or foreclosure — both figures are far larger than Geithner’s $30 billion plan to extend credit to small businesses. Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC, expects that commercial real estate defaults and losses will be the number-one factor that drives small and medium-sized banks into failure this year at a higher rate than they experienced in 2009. Extending credit to small businesses to the tune of $30 billion doesn’t seem like the best solution to the coming commercial real estate crisis or its downstream effects on businesses or the banks holding the loans.