He also said “there’s a lot of agony out there” in real estate.
His comments are well-founded.
Gone and Not Coming Back
It was assumed that, after the pandemic, commercial occupancy would resume as usual, but that’s proving not to be the case. There seem to be a number of causes.First, workers got settled into a work-from-home motif, which had been trending forward for years, well before the pandemic. Workers like not having to spend the time and money commuting, to say nothing of the 5 to 7 percent of take-home pay that one spends to keep up a professional wardrobe.
Second, crime in major cities has increased decidedly since the pandemic. While New York City has a relatively low per capita crime rate relative to other major cities, the stochastic nature of some of the crimes there earns easy headlines among the two major tabloids, four local TV network affiliates, the headquarters of all three major broadcast networks, and Fox News, which also is headquartered there. Violent crimes that happen in purportedly “safe” neighborhoods such as Wall Street and Times Square tend to terrify the workers who formerly commuted in.
In New York City, much of the high level of office vacancy is attributable to overly optimistic building plans adopted before the pandemic. Although the attack on the World Trade Center destroyed 10 million square feet of commercial office space, about a quarter of it was replaced with the new Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center.
Where This Could End Up
My mother used to say, “People grow too soon old and too late smart.”Buffett himself has written that it was Munger, now 99 years old, who changed his investment strategy from buying “fair companies at wonderful prices to buying wonderful companies at fair prices.” In that respect, Munger seems to have grown both old and smart, but smarter faster than most of us.
But what can we intuit from his recent warning on real estate?
Well, we’ve just seen a first quarter in which four regional banks collapsed, largely as a consequence of mismanaged interest rate risk; specifically, matching customers’ demand deposits against bank reserves of long-term Treasurys. Banks knew, or should have at least considered the possibility, that the ultra-low interest rates of the past several years were likely to explode, even as the Biden administration dismissed rising prices as “transitory inflation” in 2021. But clearly, several of the regional banks did not see that coming and did not brace for the rising interest rate shocks. They missed it. And so did the regulators.
So, what’s to say either the bankers were any better stewards of their commercial real estate loan portfolio? Or the regulators?
Most likely, they were not.
Real estate is heavily leveraged, meaning that nominal “owners”—usually spread among several partners and partnerships, but not always—tend to finance most of a building’s purchase price (or building costs) with bank loans. Those loans tend to be sanguine; not much (if any) of the repayment is devoted to paying down the principal amount of the borrowed funds, but tends more toward servicing interest payments, usually for a decade or more. Investors are mostly looking for after-tax cash flows.
The Japan Precedent
Toward the end of the 1980s, Japan’s banks engaged in what bankers call “extend and pretend” loans; that is, rolling over real estate debt that could not be repaid even as the value of the mortgaged property had declined. Banks didn’t take the write-downs of their bad loans, which would have adversely affected bank earnings.What to Do Now
Ronald Reagan once said, “The most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’” We should study Japan’s failures during their real estate crisis and avoid doing what Japanese policymakers did.People will suffer financial losses; jobs will be lost. The “millionaires and billionaires” so often targeted for financial punishment by activist progressives will incur some losses and may even be bankrupted. And while government can and should try to ameliorate the suffering that results from bad decisions, it should not attempt to inoculate the economy from them. That means assistance with government safety nets such as unemployment insurance, not billions of dollars in bail-outs.
Accepting the losses—when, as, and to the extent they come, and managing them as they occur—will be a critical element in avoiding something akin to Japan’s “Lost Decade.” Failing to do so, and stepping in with big bail-outs, will give the illusion of financial stability for a while, like a Potemkin Village of financial stability, but doing so will blow up the deficit and Federal Reserve balance sheet (as it did for Japan), and usher in a lengthy period of stagnation and malaise. It will spread the misery.
Creative destruction is as necessary to the maintenance of a healthy economy as much as the shedding of a snake’s skin is necessary for its growth. But to achieve that, we need to let the chips fall where they may, when they may, and as they may.