By Alex Frangos - printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C1

ATLANTA -- A one-mile stretch of Atlanta's upscale Buckhead neighborhood shows why commercial real estate is emerging as an obstacle to pulling the U.S. economy out of recession.

Separate developers in Buckhead are building four speculative office buildings at the same time with virtually no leasing activity. The 35 recent condominium projects will help give Atlanta a 40-year supply at the current sales pace. A $600 million outdoor shopping mall under way has suspended construction to save money.

The glut threatens to worsen the clobbering that many U.S. banks already are getting from nonperforming loans made to owners and developers of office buildings, shopping centers, condos and other commercial real estate.

At Bank of America Corp., first-quarter results announced Monday included a surge in the percentage of commercial real-estate loans that are nonperforming to 7.5% of the Charlotte, N.C., bank's total portfolio of such loans.

SB 108 would allow intimidation and fear to rule our court of law

Atlanta, GA—SB 108, a component of Governor Perdue’s so-called “tort reform” package, seeks to enact a ‘Victim Pays’ provision in Georgia law.  Current law dictates that each party in a lawsuit pays its own attorney fees unless specific authority is granted by statute or contract allowing for the assessment of those fees against the other party.  This provision is known as the ‘American Rule.’  This uniquely American method distinguishes our Civil Justice System from that of much of Europe which still operates under ‘The English Rule.’

By Richard Hoey

Chief Economist,

We expect (1) a gradual calming of widespread concerns about an economic depression since we believe that policymakers have a correct diagnosis of the financial and economic risks and are taking proactive monetary and fiscal policy actions to reduce them in a basic policy stance of "whatever it takes," (2) the deepest U.S. recession, G-7 recession and global recession of the Postwar period, (3) rising unemployment rates and falling capacity utilization worldwide, (4) global rebalancing with a drop in current account deficits in consumption-led economies and a drop in current account surpluses in export-led economies, (5) domestic rebalancing, (6) proactive monetary and fiscal stimulus worldwide, (7) an increased supply of financial liquidity from the Fed's elastically expanding balance sheet, (8) a gradual recuperation of the financial sector as it moves from semi-orderly deleveraging to orderly deleveraging, (9) extremely low interest rates worldwide in the coming year, (10) the continuation of an intense global inventory liquidation in early 2009, which should ease as the year progresses, aiding the transition from recession to recovery, (11) a cyclical trough in the U.S. recession around mid-2009, followed by a sluggish economic recovery as deleveraging persists during the expansion, (12) a rise in the U.S. budget deficit in 2009 to about $2 trillion--12% or more of U.S. GDP, (13) a permanent upward shift in Federal spending as a share of GDP and persistently high budget deficits, (14) low inflation worldwide with brief temporary episodes of consumer price deflation due to the global recession and the past drop in commodity prices, (15) the avoidance over the next several years of both a sustained deflation in consumer prices and a major inflation acceleration, and (16) rising protectionist risks as global unemployment continues to rise.