Elizabeth Warren : by the end of this year half of commercial real estate loans will be under water

The pending Commercial Real Estate Collapse and the state of the Economy

Elizabeth Warren : 2988 banks that by the terms of their own regulators are too concentrated in commercial real estate , these are the medium size banks , by the end of this year half of commercial real estate loans will be under water , and they are coming up for reset in 11 , 12 and 13 , this is a bad problem anyway , think about that , nearly 3000 banks out of a total of 8000 , it is the very banks that do small business lending who are about to get sucked in the nose on real estate , commercial real estate loses ...we are seeing banks that do not want to lend because they see every dollar that comes in the door and say "I got to hold on it to try to fill my commercial real estate hole ..or else I will be gone "
Elizabeth Warren : I am afraid , I am afraid because of what I see in the real economy , I am afraid because I do not see books that are clean , balance sheets that have been cleaned up ......
I’m afraid because Secretary Paulson said there’s too much concentration in the banking industry, and there’s even more concentration
today than there was
it’s that we’ve got
concentrated risk and that’s what creates too big to fail, and that’s
creating distortions throughout our economy.

We haven’t yet put our feet on solid ground and begin -- begun to
rebuild an economy we can believe in.

I think
that Summers and Geithner are smart. I think they’re honorable. I think
they approach the economy and the world through the largest institutions.
And they see the world from a top-down perspective.

I spent 25 years somewhere else.

Elizabeth Warren, Chair, The Congressional Oversight Panel
with Elizabeth Warren on Charlie Rose
in Current Affairs
on Thursday, March 4, 2010