Wednesday Wats.

Read Chapter Twenty-Nine, "Old Gods and Golfers", at writer's group last night, and I couldn't believe how many mistakes I'd made; duplicated words, dropped words, wrong words.

It was an action chapter, and that part of it seemed to go over well, at least. A good copy-editing is necessary, no matter how many times I've worked on something.

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Having a pretty good month in sales at the store, so far; about the same percentage increase I saw in December. It usually slows down in the second half of the month. Nevertheless, it sort of confirms that the weather hammered us in January.

I spent way, way too much in December of last year, and I'm still trying to catch up to that binge. One month of glory, six months of regret.

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An article in New York Magazine, The End of Wall Street As They Knew It, makes me feel much better about the Dodd-Frank economic reform bill.

Apparently, to the surprise of everyone, it's turning out to be very effective. Especially the upcoming Volcker rule, (which Wall Street is already getting prepared to conform to.)

In fact, a whole bunch of measures, including the health bill, are looking better as time goes on. It just takes time for some of these things to have an effect.

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Learned some things about commercial real estate in an article in National Review Online: "Armageddon at the Strip Mall."

I talked about this early on in my blog. That I was concerned about some of the big commercial buildings here in Bend. (We were still merrily finishing large projects well into 2008.) What happens when the rent rates go lower, and the value of the buildings decline?

I pointed specifically at banks like Bank of the Cascades who were financing a lot of the local building. Turns out, the big banks concentrated on housing, because that was where the money was. Leaving commercial lending to local or regional banks.

I think Bank of the Cascades has made a real effort to unload these loans, but still...you have to believe a lot of commercial buildings in town built in 2007 - 2008, are coming due about now:


'Typical terms included a 20 percent down payment and a five-year payment schedule that required little more than interest payments. An $80 million mortgage on a $100 million property is not so bad, but an $80 million mortgage on what is now a $60 million property is a problem. More than half of the 2007-vintage loans are expected to have trouble refinancing, and maybe well more than half. "

"This is true even for borrowers who have never missed a payment. Banks are required to take into account a number of factors when rating commercial mortgages. One of the most important is the loan-to-value ratio, which has a lot of borrowers over a particularly uncomfortable barrel..."

Of course, it being the National Review, they make a gratuitous slam at Obama. After making the case that the bad loans were made 5 years ago -- they blame him. Just plain weird. Why not blame him for Watergate while you're at it?

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