The Concerns of Workers Matter Little, and American Media Knows It

 Why else would CNN have this article:

From Dallas and Minneapolis to New York and Los Angeles, offices sit vacant or underused, showing the staying power of the work-from-home era. But clear desks and quiet break rooms aren’t just a headache for bosses eager to gather teams in person.

Investors and regulators, on high alert for signs of trouble in the financial system following recent bank failures, are now homing in on the downturn in the $20 trillion US commercial real estate market.

Just as lenders to the sector grapple with turmoil triggered by rapidly rising interest rates, the value of buildings such as offices is crashing. That could add to pain for banks and raises concerns about damaging ripple effects.

“Although this is not yet a systemic problem for the banking sector, there are legitimate concerns about contagion,” said Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University.

In the worst-case scenario, anxiety about bank lending to commercial real estate could spiral, prompting customers to yank their deposits. A bank run is what toppled Silicon Valley Bank last month, roiling financial markets and raising fears of a recession in the United States.

Asked about the danger posed by commercial real estate, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last month that banks remained “strong” and “resilient.” But attention is growing on the links between US lenders and the property sector.

“We’re watching it pretty closely,” said Michael Reynolds, vice president of investment strategy at Glenmede, a wealth manager. While he doesn’t expect office loans to become a problem for all banks, “one or two” institutions could find themselves “caught offside.”

America’s top banker, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, told CNN Thursday that he couldn’t be sure whether more banks will fail this year. Yet he was quick to point out that the current situation was very different to the 2008 global financial crisis, when there were “hundreds of institutions around the world with far too much leverage.”

Considering the amount of layoffs that have been happening (including the irony of Indeed letting people go), to act like the banks are suffering more than employees (both those let go and those who remain to pick up more work) is very brazen. Also, instead of thinking innovatively (re-design the buildings to hold office-space for different businesses or have them taken down and rebuilt) the attitude seems to be that to in order to help the banks out, we need to find a way to get people stuffed back in offices.