No. of Recommendations: 10
With so much going on in Brookfieldland it is easy to take examples and show what a great firm it is, and take other examples to show that it's rotten or doomed.
The overall complexity and relative opacity makes it difficult to make things at the top level that would give a less precise, but more accurate and insightful view of the firm and its prospects.
But it does strike me as--emblematic?--that the occasional sales of property at above booked value are to be taken as a clear ongoing demonstration that property values across the portfolio are not unrealistically high, while property level defaults, now not so wildly different in number, are taken as anomalous outliers to be ignored.
Admittedly many of the defaults may be cannily strategic rather than from distress--it's a brutal business--but still, the juxtaposition is jarring.
I'm not overly impressed with that article's provincial dissing of IFRS, which is so much better than GAAP in this industry in so many ways.
I don't book my Lehman shares at purchase cost, with or without a few adjustments around the edge, so I don't do that for my real estate holdings either.
These days the issue isn't the accounting method used, but the simple time lag between when a bit of rot becomes pretty obvious and when it shows up in released statements.
Jim
