Free Republic

Rising interest rates, the remote work trend, and the dominance of e-commerce sellers have combined to hammer the commercial real estate market over the past few years. Sky-high office and retail space vacancies are plaguing owners in this new environment, rents are plummeting, and borrowing costs have soared. As a result, U.S. commercial real estate prices have fallen 11% since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in March 2022, the IMF reported last week, the worst decline in over 50 years. The outlook for the sector is now so bleak that Cantor Fitzgerald’s billionaire chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick...

Hundreds of loans on office buildings are about to come due at a very bad time.. Loans were taken out in time of low interest rates and are now hard to refinance.. Too many of the loans defaulting could trigger banking crisis and hurt economy ... About $117 billion worth is expected to be due this year and needs to be repaid or refinanced, ... A big chunk of it is at risk of defaulting and costing banks and developers huge sums, sending some into insolvency. Owners of office space around the country took out their loans when interest rates...

Regional bank stocks fell sharply Tuesday as the fallout from the third major bank failure this year continued to put pressure on the sector. Shares of PacWest fell more than 39% on Tuesday and was on track for its fourth-straight negative session. The stock was halted for volatility multiple times. The California-based bank was not the only regional lender under pressure. Shares of Western Alliance dropped 20%. The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) sank 7.6%. The steep declines deepened losses in the sector from Monday. Over the weekend, regulators seized troubled regional bank First Republic and sold it to...

Regional banks remain front and center as Wall Street navigates through the latest banking crisis, with First Republic Bank (FRC) now being taken over by JPMorgan (JPM). This came as regulators stepped in to protect depositors from turmoil at the institution. In this context, the banking sector has fallen under the microscope, as FRC's collapse followed close on the heels of similar issues at Silvergate Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, along with the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS. With the regional banks under scrutiny, Seeking Alpha constructed a list of names that offer the most potential upside...

In what could bring back the memories of the 2008 Lehman Brothers fall for the global stock markets, trading in a number of regional US banks was halted on Friday amid a massive sell-off. Some of the affected regional US banks are First Republic, Signature Bank, PacWest Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp.Share price of First Republic declined nearly 50 percent, while PacWest Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp lost over 30 percent each. The stock price of Signature Bank fell about 25 percent. However, among the major banks, JPMorgan gained 1 per cent, while Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were down about...