11/10/23 Tis the Season to Rein in Spending

We would like to send a special salute to all of our clients and subscribers who have served and are serving our country on this Veteran’s Day.   Warren Buffet has been saying that there was a washout in the commercial real estate market coming. The dam appears to be starting to break. On the high end of the scale the office sharing company WeWork filed for bankruptcy, over $3 billion in the hole after having once been worth $47 bln. The scavengers are now picking through the carcass of the Signature bank failure, buying their commercial loans at a 40% discount. Closer to home in Marshalltown Iowa, Alliant Energy cut off power to the local mall for non-payment of the light bill, leaving the mall’s 15 businesses in the dark just before the Christmas shopping season. The mall was owned by a New York Investment Group. They own several other malls in Iowa and reportedly have had trouble paying their property taxes and meeting fire codes. The sharp rise in interest rates is pulling back the surf to see who has a swimsuit on. They are finding a few naked and likely to uncover many more.   I do…