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As other financial service giants such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase warn of a possible or even likely economic shock because of the slump in commercial real estate, Goldman Sachs is less concerned about the risks ahead, especially from the exposure of regional banks to CRE.
"The risk of a vicious circle of large leveraged losses and undercapitalized balance sheets that would pose a threat to financial stability is still limited," Goldman Sachs said in a research note released Monday by strategists Lotfi Karoui and Vinay Viswanathan, as reported by Market Insider.
That assessment is at odds with Bank of America's Michael Hartnett, who last week called CRE “the next shoe to drop” as the industry is squeezed by the sudden increase in interest rates and permanently sluggish occupancies in the office sector, among other factors.
"The regional banks have most of the exposure" to bad commercial real estate, short seller Jim Chanos said during an episode of the Business Breakdowns podcast.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNN on Thursday that he didn't know whether more banks will fail this year, but the turbulence in the financial system could be a factor in a coming recession. He also said the current situation isn't like the Great Financial Crisis.
The Goldman Sachs note acknowledges the problems facing the office market, but the strategists say most other sectors, especially apartments and industrial assets, won't suffer much of a crash.
"We expect office loan delinquencies to materially increase, but think this is unlikely to lead to systemic risk given healthier fundamentals in other commercial real estate subsectors," Karoui and Viswanathan wrote.
Office valuations are already on the slide, Green Street reported last week. Office lost 25% in its index value since a year ago, though it was unchanged in March compared with February.
“Office has seen the largest price declines, where even high-quality properties are down 25% over the past year,” Green Street co-Head of Strategic Research Peter Rothemund said.
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