Right now there is a debt bomb at the center of the U.S. economy, with commercial real estate in this country in total free fall.

Visit any mainstream commercial building here in New York: On the ground floor you have restaurants, Starbucks, boutique bakeries, and so on, and it looks nice. But go up the elevator, and you’ll find floor, after floor, after floor, after floor of emptied-out office space.

No companies. No employees. No workers. No nothing. Just a giant loan from the bank that no longer has any rental income to support it.

It’s fair to say that we’re living in a new Gilded Age. On the outside everything looks fine – it’s New York City, the commercial capital of America. You have skyscrapers packed one next to the other, people walking around, the whole thing looks bustling.

But on the inside, you have emptied-out buildings, with floor after floor completely vacant.

And it’s not just New York. The same is also true in many other large cities in America: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, San Jose, Portland, Atlanta, and so on.

And the match to this powder keg lies in the fact that roughly $1.2 trillion-worth of this commercial real estate debt is set to mature over the next 2 years.

A lot of banks are about to learn that all the money they lent out to buy these buildings simply isn’t there anymore.

And so, to figure out what’s going on, which banks are going to be most severely affected, and what’ll likely happen to common Americans like you and I, we put together an entire episode outlining this problem – the popping of the American commercial real estate bubble.

Written by Roman Balmakov for Facts Matter on the Epoch Times ~ August 14, 2024