<a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/04/guest-post-imminent-disinformation.html">Hat tip to Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism for finding this snarky chartpr0ntastic gem on CMBS</a>.
<em>Commercial real estate is nothing more than a proxy for the intersection of the two historically core driving forces in the U.S. economy: real estate values and business conditions. And as the facts above indicate, the deterioration is only starting to pick up.
But what about all the stimulus programs skeptics will ask? The bail out packages? The constant funneling of taxpayer money into every underperforming segment of economy?
The truth is that the more taxpayer money is dumped to try to fill the abyss, it may become marginally shallower, but only at the expense of it getting wider. At some point soon (if not already), the U.S. economy will be unweenable from the trillions and trillions of taxpayer subsidies all the while it becomes more indebted to both its investors and taxpayers, further exacerbating the abovementioned paradox (presumably not without a motive). As the multi-trillion CRE crash continues to deplete the left side of the financials' balance sheet with an exponentially growing pace (and I have not even touched on the credit card topic), the banks will be left scratching their heads what accounting rules to bend, which insurance companies to implode and get another AIG-like piggybank, how to break REG-FD more and more creatively with select memo leaks, how to manipulate the market, and how to make the Tsy curve becomes even more upward sloping with the compliments of the Fed and the Treasury. In the meantime the disinformation rift between the American taxpayers and investors will keep growing until inevitably, one day, it will escalate to the point where empty promises on prime time TV by the administration's photogenic representatives will not suffice, and real actions that benefit future American generations will be demanded... What happens after I have no idea.</em>
