Free Republic

From ZeroHedge, here is a tantalizing story … behind a pay wall. But here is the gist of what I think the article says. Or at least my spin on it. Here is a chart of US office vacancies nationally (yellow), New York (white), San Franciso (green) and Los Angeles (orange). Note the rapid decline in office vacancies just prior to the financial crisis (often mislabeled as the subprime mortgage crisis). Then look at office vacancies after The Fed’s massive monetary experiment of setting rates to near zero and buying a ton of Treasuries, Agency MBS. etc. While San Francisco...

Office vacancy rate in the US has climbed to 20.2% in 2023 Financing for residential building is tepid despite demand The Covid economic shutdowns have a disastrous effect on small businesses as we know. But office space is really getting crushed in terms of vacancy rates. In fact, it is so bad the investor Kyle Bass is suggesting that office space be torn down across the US much in the same way that FDR’s Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace ordered the mass execution of hogs in order to drive up prices in a deflationary economy. (Bloomberg) Kyle Bass has some advice...

]Google's finance chief, Ruth Porat, has penned a rare company-wide email explaining how the tech giant is introducing measures to cut employee services in an effort to reduce expenses. The company's goal for 2023 is to 'deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency.'

San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Shamann Walton urged his colleagues Tuesday to approve $50 million for an “Office of Reparations” in anticipation of eventual approval of a bigger reparations plan. As Breitbart News has reported, San Francisco’s reparations committee, created at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, is considering a proposal to pay $5 million to each long-term black resident. Though California entered the Union as a free state in 1850, and there is no mathematical calculation behind the $5 million figure, proponents of the plan are eager to see it implemented as an example...

A growing number of office landlords are defaulting on loan payments as the rise of remote work causes more corporate tenants to rethink long-term leases... The delinquency rate on office loans increased by a quarter percentage point to 1.83% last month .. While the number is still relatively low, the increase was the sharpest of its kind since December 2021. ... The shift away from traditional offices has impacted major firms. Brookfield Asset Management recently disclosed a default on more than $70 million in debt on two office towers in Los Angeles. In Manhattan, real estate firm RXR is reportedly...

The man who entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and was photographed in the office of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was convicted on Monday of eight federal crimes related to the incident, including four felonies. Richard “Rigo” Barnett, 62, was convicted of all the charges filed against him after nine days of testimony in the trial in Washington. The jury reached a decision in less than two hours, according to The Washington Post. His most serious conviction was obstructing an official government proceeding, with a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. His sentencing is set for...

President Biden and his team on Friday marked two years since he was sworn into office, highlighting economic gains and bipartisan achievements that will likely form the backbone of a potential re-election bid. “When I came into office, we had a lot of problems,” Biden told a gathering of bipartisan mayors at the White House. “The pandemic was raging. Our economy was reeling, but we acted together. Now, two years in, it’s clearer than ever our plan is working.” The president gave a wide-ranging speech in which he pointed to infrastructure investments, the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act last...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that running for president would not “immunize” former President Donald Trump from being prosecuted. Cooper asked, “You’ve been uniquely positioned over the past several years as someone who understands the legal and constitutional issues swirling around the former president. If he is making this announcement in part believing that this will somehow protect him from investigations or indictments, is that accurate, do you think?”

I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew. That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There...

Billionaire real estate tycoon Stephen Ross suggested Friday that a looming US economic recession could put an end to the work-from-home craze that swept the country during the pandemic. Ross, whose firm Related Cos. owns office space in New York and across the US, suggested the possibility of layoffs could lead employees to drop their resistance.

To Jonathan Pruiett, it just didn't make sense. A geospatial analyst who updates Google maps for a living, Pruiett had been called back to his company's offices in Bothell, Washington, five days a week, starting June 6. Like many on his team, Pruiett had only worked remotely, having started the job in the pandemic. He'd adapted well to it, finding efficiencies such as multitasking during virtual meetings, using the time to process data. And yet, now he was being told to report to office. Anyone who failed to report within three days of the return date would be processed as...

President Joe Biden’s administration announced Tuesday a new Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) to preserve “communities of color” from zoning restrictions and pollution, among other objectives. The OEJ will report to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and will sit within the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at HHS, according to Xavier Becerra, secretary of HHS. Biden created the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in 2021 to stop the warming of the globe.

Companies who are demanding workers back at the office every day may actually see their workers join the Great Resignation instead. It may especially be a challenge to get Gen Z workers to work in person all the time. That's based on survey findings from ADP Research Institute. The new report, "People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View", included results from a November 2021 survey of over 32,000 workers in 17 countries. The countries surveyed include the US, ​​India, and the Netherlands.

Do you want to see a magic trick? Like how governments shut down the US economy resulting in collapsing office occupancy rates while the price of office buildings rose dramatically (+16.3% since Q2 2020)? Kastle’s “Back to work barometer” is showing that the 10 city average occupancy rate in the US is now only 42.8% as remote working has caught on. And the fear of yet another Covid mutation is keeping office occupancy below 50%. Even Washington DC, home of Dr. Anthony Fauci, has only a 37.5% occupancy rate. Of the top 10 cities, Austin TX has the highest office...

In the Washington D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., carjackings have made the news lately. Thieves steal cars at Virginia gas stations and race across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac and into Maryland to relative safety. The Department of Justice doesn’t seem to be doing anything about enforcing the federal laws prohibiting transport of stolen goods across the Virginia-Maryland state line. If the carjacker was named James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, things would be very different. The saga of James O’Keefe’s quite possibly completely legal acquisition of Ashley Biden’s diary, and the resulting DOJ secret seizure of his emails...

They’re slob goblins. With employees prepping to flock back to the office amid easing COVID restrictions, many are faced with the same dilemma — how to switch off “goblin mode” now that they’re around other people.

MSNBC contributor and former Watergate lawyer Jill Wine-Banks said on this week’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show” that former President Donald Trump taking documents to his Mar-a-Lago property could cause him to be banned from holding office. Capehart asked, “The National Archives confirmed that classified national security documents were among the items in the 15 boxes of White House records Trump brought with him to Mar-a-Lago.”

Hunter Biden planned to share his family’s office space in Washington, DC, with a Chinese intelligence-linked firm that employed a man Hunter described as “the f**king spy chief of China,” according to Peter Schweizer’s new bombshell book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. According to the book, Hunter Biden planned in 2017 to set up an office in Washington that would house his businesses, his father’s Biden Foundation, and a representative of a Chinese global energy company he had cultivated close ties to, CEFC China Energy.

President Joe Biden defended the first year of his presidency at a press conference at the White House on Wednesday, refusing to change course amidst record-low approval ratings of his job performance. When asked by a reporter if he overpromised Americans what he could accomplish as president, Biden replied, “I didn’t overpromise. And I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.”

The coronavirus loses about 50 percent of its ability to infect about 10 seconds after it becomes airborne in a typical office environment, according to a new study about how the deadly bug survives in exhaled air. “People have been focused on poorly ventilated spaces and thinking about airborne transmission over meters or across a room,” said Prof. Jonathan Reid, director of the University of Bristol’s Aerosol Research Centre, the Guardian reported.