Starting from the middle of last week, the share price of New York Community Bank in the United States has experienced a significant decline.
However, it was unexpected that banks in distant Europe and Japan would also echo this trend, and without exception, they were all affected by losses from U.S. commercial real estate loans.
The alarm has been sounded; is the U.S. real estate crisis about to plunge the globe into the quagmire once again?
The 2008 U.S. subprime crisis began in the real estate market and eventually evolved into a global crisis.
In the years leading up to the crisis, the two major U.S. housing agencies issued a large number of subprime loans to unqualified homebuyers, leading to many Americans owning their own homes as a result.
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But by 2006, the Federal Reserve raised the interest rate to 5.25%, and subsequently, many homebuyers began to struggle to repay their loans, leading to the outbreak of the crisis.
Now, the interest rate is back at 5.25%, but the biggest difference from the last round is that the crisis is not coming from residential housing, but from commercial real estate.
Today, feedback from banks in the United States, Japan, and Germany indicates that this commercial real estate crisis has already affected multiple banks worldwide.
Last week, Aoi Bank in Tokyo, Japan, anticipated a loss of 28 billion yen, with loan losses from U.S. commercial real estate being the primary source of the Japanese bank's losses.
The reason for this is that in recent years, Japanese investors have significantly increased their investments in U.S. commercial real estate. In 2023 alone, the investment amount reached $3.7 billion, a nearly 100% year-on-year increase. When investing in U.S. real estate, most of the loans applied for by these Japanese investors came from Japanese banks.How bad is the commercial real estate situation in the United States now?
A renowned Canadian asset management firm made a decision last March that left banks in shock.
The firm, which owned a 52-story commercial building in Los Angeles, had previously secured loans from banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, totaling $465 million.
However, the valuation of this building has plummeted significantly over the past two years. It was worth $632 million in 2021, but by 2023, it had dropped to just $270 million.
As the building's value has fallen below the loan amount, the Canadian company simply relinquished ownership of the building, leaving it to the banks on Wall Street.
The impact is not limited to banks in the United States or Wall Street. Deutsche Bank, a European institution, has recently released data showing that U.S. commercial real estate loans have also affected this established European bank, forcing it to increase its provisions for losses by five times to $123 million.
In the United States, the impact of commercial real estate on banks primarily affects small and regional banks, as these smaller banks have a significantly higher share in commercial lending.
According to a financial data company, the United States will have $2.2 trillion in commercial real estate loans maturing before 2027. Currently, this enormous risk of $2.2 trillion is the most concerning issue.
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