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Comment by symlinkk | Hacker News Reader

> About 23% of office space in the United States was vacant or available for sublet at the end of November, according to Avison Young, a real estate services firm, compared with 16% before the pandemic

Wow it’s literally nothing

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It's a 50% rise in vacancy rate, which is literally not nothing.

It has impacted the market for office building construction. Offices are starting to feel like malls: they exist and serve a function, but aren't strictly necessary.

Speaking of malls, I went shopping at a couple malls and they have seemingly picked up on traffic. I wonder if they were there the same reason I was? (I needed to get out of the house)

Manufactured crisis for those with exposure. Over leveraged in rapidly rising interest rate env. Failure to manage your risk doesn’t earn sympathy.

Can you expand on this please? I know next to nothing about how this market operates, so it's very unclear if a 7% difference in supply nothing or absolutely disturbing.

It’s more than certain high value regions like nyc and sf have a much higher rate and it’s continues to head in the wrong direction.

A 50% increase is pretty significant. Especially if you're the landlord with a mortgage.

Landlord walks away, bank eats the loss, FDIC steps in if the bank mismanaged the risk and fails. Is FDIC going to fail? Obviously not, the government and central bank will not fail.

So you want another round of regional bank failures so more money will move to JP Morgan? Can't see that going wrong.

If the insolvency already exists, are you advocating to pretend it doesn’t? There are too many banks in the US anyway. If community or regional banks fail, replace them with postal banking or FedAccounts if you’re concerned about lack of deposit account options.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176513695/does-the-u-s-have-...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...

This is Accelerationism and I don't think it will actually lead to a better outcome--almost certainly will just lead to fewer/larger banks and not postal banking. I cannot see a slight chance of postal banking ever happening in the US when we can't even agree on other more fundamental things. Just look at who spends the most on lobbying. Congress isn't going to bite the hand that feeds them. So good luck.

> Is FDIC going to fail? Obviously not.

I wouldn't say that. Why are there bank runs on failing banks that are FDIC insured? Do people not trust it?

Unsophisticated humans or mismanagement of risk (uninsured cash equivalents). Fear is a feeling, risk can be measured and mitigated.

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