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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (181538)	2/6/2012 7:52:14 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543156

Thanks. Good thought. The closest market indicator I have is TIAA Real Estate, which is available via our TIAA-CREF retirement accounts, but not generally available to the public. It's been climbing steadily, with minimal volatility, since early 2010. They are not a REIT in the classic sense of owning mortgages but rather own properties. And, at one time, owned several malls or had very large shares in such, including the Mall of America around Minneapolis. I just checked their holdings again and they have few malls in their top ten holdings. In fact, only one labeled as such. The rest look to be office holdings or large apartment complexes. So, in summary, all the indicators look to be damaged at best. The NYTimes' article could easily have been built out of several anecdotes which just happened to coincide with what we saw. But the twin effects of a very long term rather severe economic downturn and the internet sales gig suggests more than a few underlying problems.