Sure thing, kids LOVE the bubbles. The blowing, the running around, the popping.

All the things that gives real estate investors and developers fits.

Any simple search on “real estate” in a news story for the past two years would more than likely also mention the word “bubble”. In fact, a quick Google search of “real estate” and “bubble” turned up 998 news stories — in the past month!

At the Reuters Global Real Estate Summit, the problems that have plagued — and continue to plague — the real estate market has been much on the minds of all our guests, including Scott Schwartz, managing director of Marathon Asset Management.

Recognizing the breadth and depth of this real estate trough is critical for Schwartz’s business, but it is also equally key for him to see what’s coming at him down the road.

That is, “What’s next?”

Schwartz wonders about the expansion currently happening in Dubai and also sends up warning flares on another non-US economy — which he mentions in the attached audio clip.

Schwartz was one of the featured guests on the first day of the U.S. arm of this global summit — which has guests in New York, London, Dubai and Singapore and runs through Thursday.

Asked to give a letter grade for the performance of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson during the credit crisis, Goldman Sachs’ senior investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen laughed. “I spent several years where he provided a performance review to other people,” she told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit, about the former Goldman CEO. To find out how Paulson fared in Abby’s eyes, please click here  

   Credit ratings agencies have been under fire from investors for giving the highest ratings for what turned out to be risky assets.
    But Standard & Poor’s President Deven Sharma told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit investors just didn’t really understand what a triple-A rating meant.
    “It’s a question a lot of people ask: Is a triple-A a triple-A a triple-A?” Sharma said. “We reflected on it and recognised one of the things we didn’t explain to investors as much as we should have done is what comparability of ratings really  means.”
    To listen to what he had to say, please click here

Veteran Wall Street banking analyst Richard Bove sees Lehman Brothers surviving – but he doesn’t think they’ll be making a lot of money.
   There’s just not a lot of business there at the moment for brokers like Lehman, he told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York.
    To listen to a clip of what Bove had to say, please click here