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The Real Risk to Real Estate Today

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

Release Date: 05/21/2025

The Crash You Won’t See Coming — Because It’s Already Started show art The Crash You Won’t See Coming — Because It’s Already Started

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

The Real Estate Cycle: A Warning for 2026   Insights from Phil Anderson on the Coming Real Estate Market Crash In my conversation with renowned economist Phil Anderson, you will gain unprecedented insight into the mechanics of real estate cycles and why we are right on the precipice of the next major real estate market crash.   Anderson, author of "The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking," presents a compelling case that combines economic theory with historical precedent to paint a picture of where we stand today – and where we’re headed tomorrow.   The...

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The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

The Margin of Error Has Vanished: What CRE Investors Should Be Watching Now Commentary on a conversation with John Chang, Senior Vice President and National Director, Research and Advisory Services, Marcus & Millichap   The New CRE Investment Mandate: Survive First, Then Thrive “The margin of error has narrowed to virtually zero.” This was John Chang’s stark assessment of today’s commercial real estate environment – an era marked by fragile capital markets, rising Treasury yields, policy instability, and speculative hangovers from a decade of cheap money. According to...

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The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

Leyla Kunimoto brings a rare and unfiltered perspective to today’s commercial real estate conversation: that of a full-time individual LP who writes publicly about her investment decisions. She’s not a sponsor, a capital raiser, or a fund manager; she’s an investor allocating her own capital and speaking candidly about what she sees in the market.   Through her newsletter Accredited Investor Insights, Leyla connects with hundreds of other LPs and GPs, giving her a uniquely well-informed view of how sentiment is shifting, how sponsors are adapting (or not), and why many individual...

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How to Survive the Coming Real Estate Storm show art How to Survive the Coming Real Estate Storm

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

How to Survive the Coming Real Estate Storm – What Sean Kelly-Rand Learned at Lehman   For the experienced real estate investor or sponsor, this is a masterclass in what really matters.   When Lehman Brothers unraveled in 2008, it exposed a truth that many in the real estate world still prefer to ignore: even the most sophisticated capital structures can implode when the cost of capital and access to liquidity are misunderstood – or worse, taken for granted. My podcast/YouTube show guest today, Sean Kelly-Rand, didn’t just watch that collapse unfold; he lived through it...

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Navigating Multifamily CRE in a Volatile Environment show art Navigating Multifamily CRE in a Volatile Environment

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

Navigating Multifamily CRE in a Volatile Environment Insights from Paul Fiorilla, Director of U.S. Research at Yardi Matrix   Paul Fiorilla offers a data-driven view of today’s commercial real estate (CRE) landscape using the vast resources he has at his disposal at Yardi.   While market sentiment may be growing more optimistic, Fiorilla acknowledges investors should separate short-term mood from long-term fundamentals. His perspective, rooted in close analysis of multifamily data and macro conditions, is both pragmatic and cautionary: yes, there’s capital on the sidelines...

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The Real Risk to Real Estate Today show art The Real Risk to Real Estate Today

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

The Dollar Standard, Global Liquidity, and the Coming Economic Reckoning In my expansive and highly accessible conversation with renowned economist Richard Duncan, we discuss the logic behind his long-running critique of the international monetary system, a system Richard calls the Dollar Standard where he explains why current U.S. policy moves, the system could come crashing down.   The Origins of the Dollar Standard and America’s “Exorbitant Privilege” The Dollar Standard, Duncan explains, evolved out of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (implemented after WWII) in...

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The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

When it comes to understanding real estate cycles, few voices carry as much weight as Prof. Glenn Mueller, of Denver University. With over 40 years in the real estate industry and more than three decades of publishing the Market Cycle Monitor – used by institutional investors, developers, and academics alike – his data-driven framework is one of the most respected in commercial real estate.   In my conversation with Prof. Mueller, he shared where each property type stands today, what signals matter most, and how CRE professionals should be thinking about the road ahead.   ...

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The Illusion of Diversification show art The Illusion of Diversification

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

Unlocking Private Market Potential: Key Insights from Jim Dowd of North Capital   Jim Dowd, CEO of North Capital, brings four decades of experience across the sell-side and buy-side to my discussion with him on a topic top of mind for commercial real estate sponsors and investors: how to navigate a rapidly shifting capital landscape where regulation, liquidity, investor behavior, and macro volatility collide.   Here are the key insights from our conversation – designed specifically to you make better, more informed investment decisions in today’s market.   1. Private...

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What the Debt Markets are Telling Us Now show art What the Debt Markets are Telling Us Now

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

The Pulse of the Debt Markets — with Orest Mandzy, CRE Direct Capital market confidence is cautiously returning, but undercurrents of risk remain. In my wide-ranging conversation with Orest Mandzy, Managing Editor of Commercial Real Estate Direct, we discuss what recent CMBS issuance tells us about liquidity, why delinquency headlines may be misleading, and how sponsors can position themselves amid policy shocks and structural market shifts.   Liquidity Is Back — But Driven by Giants CMBS issuance jumped 110% in Q1 2025, totaling nearly $37 billion. While that headline suggests a...

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Rates, Risk, and the Return of Discipline show art Rates, Risk, and the Return of Discipline

The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.

What the Debt Markets Are Telling Us — and Why Sponsors Should Listen Insights from Lisa Pendergast, Executive Director, CREFC   In today’s capital markets, where debt is more expensive, less available, and slower to move, understanding how credit flows work has become just as important as understanding your deal. That’s why I sat down with Lisa Pendergast, Executive Director of the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council (CREFC) – a central figure in the $5 trillion CRE debt markets – to ask what the institutions upstream are seeing, and what that means for those of us...

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More Episodes
The Dollar Standard, Global Liquidity, and the Coming Economic Reckoning
In my expansive and highly accessible conversation with renowned economist Richard Duncan, we discuss the logic behind his long-running critique of the international monetary system, a system Richard calls the Dollar Standard where he explains why current U.S. policy moves, the system could come crashing down.
 
The Origins of the Dollar Standard and America’s “Exorbitant Privilege”
The Dollar Standard, Duncan explains, evolved out of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (implemented after WWII) in 1971. Under Bretton Woods, currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold. But when other countries accumulated more dollars than the U.S. had gold, President Nixon suspended dollar convertibility, effectively ending the gold standard.
 
What replaced it was a floating currency regime and the birth of the Dollar Standard. Crucially, the U.S. began running persistent trade deficits, importing goods and sending dollars abroad. These dollars, in turn, were recycled by foreign central banks, especially in trade surplus countries like China and Japan, into U.S. dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasuries, but also equities and real estate.
 
This loop, Duncan argues, created America’s “exorbitant privilege”: the ability to fund government spending and consumer imports at artificially low interest rates, because foreign buyers are constantly reinvesting in U.S. debt and assets.
 
The phrase "exorbitant privilege" was first coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who later became President of France, but at the time was serving as France’s Minister of Finance under President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.
 
He used the term to criticize the unique advantages enjoyed by the United States under the Bretton Woods system, particularly the ability to run persistent deficits by issuing debt in its own currency (the U.S. dollar), while foreign nations had to hold and use those dollars to trade and build reserves.
 
Giscard and de Gaulle saw this as an unfair financial hegemony that allowed the U.S. to “live beyond its means” at the expense of others. The phrase was intended as a critique but, ironically, it's now often used in a neutral or even admiring tone by economists.
 
How Global Credit Became a Bubble Machine
Duncan makes the case that this system, while benefiting the U.S. enormously, has been fundamentally destabilizing for the rest of the world.
 
As surplus countries absorb dollar inflows, their central banks convert them into local currency, often by printing their own money. That liquidity ends up in domestic banking systems, fueling excessive credit growth, asset bubbles, and financial crises.
 
It happened in Japan in the late 1980s. It triggered the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s. And it helped fuel China’s real estate boom and the global credit bubble that preceded the 2008 collapse.
 
Notably, Duncan predicted the 2008 financial crisis in his 2003 book, The Dollar Crisis, warning that runaway global imbalances would eventually lead to a systemic shock. He now argues that post-2008 bailouts and quantitative easing (QE) only expanded the bubble rather than fixing the problem.
 
Trump’s Trade Doctrine: Potential to Destabilize the System
Fast forward to 2025: Trump is back in office, and his administration is moving quickly to reshape global trade.
 
Duncan’s concern is that the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit by imposing high tariffs and pursuing a strategic devaluation of the dollar, undermines the very structure that has sustained U.S. prosperity and global financial stability for decades.
Why? Because every U.S. trade deficit is matched by a capital inflow. It’s a balance-of-payments identity: if the U.S. runs a $1.1 trillion current account deficit, there must be a $1.1 trillion capital surplus (i.e., inflows) to finance it.
 
Take that away and you choke off the supply of global liquidity that props up asset prices worldwide.
 
The Doom Loop: What Happens If Capital Stops Flowing In
Duncan walks through the scenario:
  • If tariffs succeed in shrinking the trade deficit, dollars stop flowing abroad.
  • Without those dollars, foreign central banks have fewer reserves to recycle into U.S. assets.
  • This reduces demand for Treasuries, pushing interest rates up.
  • Rising rates crush real estate, stocks, and credit-dependent sectors.
  • Simultaneously, trade-surplus economies face a liquidity crunch, leading to job losses, bankruptcies, and potential financial crises.
The result? A global depression triggered not by market excess this time, but by deliberate government policy.
 
Duncan notes that the Trump administration has already blinked once in rolling back tariffs on China after markets began to seize. But the damage to global confidence in the dollar’s stability and America’s reliability as a trading partner may already be done.
 
CRE-Specific Risks
For CRE professionals, Duncan’s framework suggests several key risks:
  1. Interest Rate Volatility: If capital inflows decline, Treasury demand will fall and rates may rise, increasing financing costs and repricing assets downward.
  2. Foreign Capital Flight: A weakening dollar and escalating trade tensions could lead to foreign divestment from U.S. real estate, especially in coastal gateway cities where foreign investors are dominant.
  3. Liquidity Shock: Reduced global liquidity may tighten credit markets, making debt financing harder to access for new acquisitions or refis.
  4. Wealth Effect Reversal: Falling stock prices and higher rates could curb consumer spending and investor confidence, affecting retail, hospitality, and housing-linked CRE.
Is There a Way Out?
Despite the dire tone, Duncan offers a constructive alternative. In his more recent book, The Money Revolution, he advocates using the U.S. government’s borrowing capacity, enabled by dollar dominance and low rates, to invest aggressively in future-focused industries: AI, biotech, quantum computing, green energy.
 
In short: inflate productively, not destructively. Use fiat-financed public investment to grow out of the debt bubble, rather than letting it implode through austerity or protectionism.
But he acknowledges that political will may be lacking and that, without it, the only other option will be another round of massive QE when the next crisis hits.
 
Final Thought
Duncan’s message is clear: we are not playing by gold standard rules anymore. The U.S. economy, and the world’s, runs on confidence, liquidity, and the flow of capital. Disrupt that system and we may find ourselves testing whether the Fed and Treasury can reflate the bubble one more time.
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You may not agree with Richard’s perspective but, as a real estate investor, understanding differing points of view helps in underwriting investment risk by incorporating possible downsides into exit strategies.
 
This is a fascinating and accessible discussion. Tune in if you want to understand the real risks underpinning your real estate investment decisions in the coming months.
 
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In this series, I cut through the noise to examine how shifting macroeconomic forces and rising geopolitical risk are reshaping real estate investing.
 
With insights from economists, academics, and seasoned professionals, this show helps investors respond to market uncertainty with clarity, discipline, and a focus on downside protection. 
 
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