2009-09-10nytimes.com

The 26-story Tao — begun in 2006, just as the Florida real estate market imploded — is one of the many troubled condominium projects that have mired Corus in red ink and now threaten its survival. Federal authorities are racing to broker a sale of Corus to avert yet another costly banking collapse.

...

The primary regulator of Corus, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, failed to sound the alarm until Corus was deeply troubled.

“They are the perfect analogy of a boom-bust bank,” said Jack McCabe, the head of a real estate research and consulting firm in South Florida. Corus executives, he said, behaved more like property speculators than bankers.

I think he meant archetype, not analogy. An analogy is something that is similar. Corus is one of the major poster children for a failed boom-bust bank of the current housing bubble/crash.

The failure of Corus would cost an already strained Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation billions. It would also underscore the wave of troubled commercial real estate loans now threatening to crash down on much of the American banking industry. Construction and land loans are now the biggest problem for hundreds of deeply troubled lenders and pose far greater dangers than commercial loans or home mortgages, according to Foresight Analytics, a banking industry research firm.

...

And in downtown Miami, Corus financed the Ivy and the Mint, adjacent properties that were competing for the same buyers.

“It was like building two Wal-Marts next door to each other and thinking you would double sales,” Mr. McCabe said of the Miami projects.

Hah hah! Now that one was well put. May they, and their development partners, their investors, and their customers, all go bankrupt.



Comments:

catherine at 19:05 2009-09-10 said:
everyone, EVERYONE gets at least a 50% haircut this time, this is the Depression II and no one gets out without some loss...........I know some are making a killing on the losses............but where do you keep a million or a billion nowadays, hmnnnnn?????

you can keep quite a lot around the house but these guys don't know what is coming yet...............

people are ready to hit the streets with unemployment benefits stopping after a certain date...............IT AIN'T GONNA BE COOL TO BE RICH VERY VERY SHORTLY..............so sad as the Democrats continue to play the rich against poor role - they always win with class envy..........but this time is different, they are riling up the masses and they have missed how MANY THERE ARE........................ Permalink

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