Remember the good old days where — if you lived in the United States anyway — people would talk about “emerging markets”?

We’d nod our heads knowingly, wishing these poor folks the best as they tried to accumulate the swell things we had bought for ourselves. We knew that residents of Mumbai or Caracas or somewhere would never attain the great things we had in such abundance here in the good old USA (Hummers; his and hers monogrammed dishtowels; zero down, 110% mortgages on houses we couldn’t afford … that kind of stuff), but we still wished them well.

So, here we are in 2009 and at this year’s Reuters Global Real Estate Summit we find that the new emerging market is … well, it’s right down the block.

According to our guest Tom Shapiro, president of GoldenTree InSite Partners private equity investment firm, the new emerging market in the real estate world is the United States.

Shapiro, in a lively discussion, spoke glowingly about his firm’s recent new business in Brazil and about other opportunities he was seeing outside the United States. But, while he said his firm had not made any investment in the U.S. in about two years, he was starting to look for opportunities and see some enthusiasm for deals to get done.

Shapiro said it was still to early to decide what inning the real estate meltdown was in, but he was starting to see some interest from the sidelines about what the “next big thing” would be — and with cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston as potential growth engines, he was a little hopeful.

Optimism this week has been pretty thin in the real estate world, so we need to take it where we can get it.

Shapiro was one of the featured speakers at this year’s global summit, which continues through the end of this week in New York, London, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur.

For more of Shapiro’s comments, please click the link below and hear an audio clip:

Tom Shapiro, GoldenTree InSite

When it comes to shopping for bargains these days, retailers are expanding their window of possibilities the same way as increasingly price-conscious consumers.

While the concept of outlet malls and shopping centers was once considered a last-ditch way to unload excess inventory, Steven Tanger, chief executive at Tanger Outlet Centers, says the model is changing…and fast!

Tanger, speaking at the Reuters Real Estate Summit on Tuesday, said that many retailers who had previously shunned the outlet concept are starting to look at the option as more than just something for “the other guy.”

Mr. Tanger also gave us an update on how business conditions are looking overall — including how much the recent spate of lousy weather in New York is weighing on shoppers’ moods (it hasn’t helped our moods that much either, quite honestly!).

But Mr. Tanger was a bit more sunny than the New York weather has been – at least about his own space in the retail world. He sees companies and store concepts including Limited Brands, Victoria’s Secret and Restoration Hardware all expanding their businesses into outlets.

He even sees an outlet market for plastic shoes — as Crocs has entered the space.

Tanger, with outlets spread throughout the United States, sees this expansion as a plus for his business and a definite avenue for future growth. While Tanger is a very East Coast-centric concept right now, the map of the United States has a lot of room for growth for the company and Tanger said he and his team are looking for opportunities to expand right away.

Tanger was one of the featured speakers at this year’s annual real estate summit. This year the summit is a global effort with guests in cities including New York, London, Shanghai, Sydney and Moscow. The summit runs through this week.

For an audio sampling of Tanger’s comments, please click on the link below:

Steven Tanger, CEO Tanger Outlet Centers

Everyone likes to set records. Think about those two giant twins who felt the need to ride motorcycles for their Guinness Book of World Records picture. What were those guys thinking?

Well, after many Reuters Summits, it seemed we set a record on Monday for the use of the word “crap” in one session.

It’s not a particularly glorious achievement, of course, but when thinking about the state of the real estate industry these past few years the words could have been a lot more nasty.

At the Reuters Real Estate Summit today, Richard Jones, partner at the Dechert LLP law firm and co-chair of the firm’s real estate group, spoke about the kinds of deals that will have to get done to help get the ball rolling on the many restructurings that need to be completed industry-wide in the next few years.

As there are a great number of troubled loans out there, the question of what happens to the worst of them (jokingly granted an effluent-style nickname). Jones, who advises clients on almost every side of an available real estate transaction, gave a good sense of exactly what will have to happen to start seeing the market swing back into action.

Jones was one of the featured speakers at this year’s summit, whch continues through this week around the globe. Reuters will be welcoming guests to centers including New York, London, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney.

For a chance to listen to Jones’ thoughts, please click on the link below:

Richard Jones, Dechert LLC

It’s not a motorcycle or a unicycle - we’re talking the overall real estate business cycle.

While the bulk of the focus at this year’s Reuters Real Estate Summit is on the commercial real estate side of the business, Richard Dugas, chief executive of Pulte Homes, spoke to us about how things look on the residential side of the aisle.

It remains pretty rough out there.

Dugas told us it was still difficult to predict where things stood and how the rest of 2009 would shape up, but he did sound somewhat hopeful that the sector had leveled off from its dramatically depressed levels seen during 2008.

The confetti was not going off and there was no champagne being passed around just yet, but after a ride south that the residential real estate and building industry has seen, “not getting much worse,” sounds a lot like “better”.

Dugas was one of the featured speakers at our annual Real Estate summit, which this year has guests across the globe in centers including New York, London, Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

To hear Dugas’ comments, please click on the link below:

Richard Dugas, CEO Pulte Homes

    The sprouting of privately-held alternative trading venues has seriously mucked up the trading landscapes in the United States and elsewhere, or so says Thomas Caldwell, chairman and chief executive of Caldwell Financial.
    Caldwell, founder of a major exchange investment firm, sees a world that has quickly evolved into one of nimble, electronic players coupled with more and more trading venues with the proliferation of alternative trading systems, or ATSs.
    (They’re also called electronic communications networks (ECNs) in the United States and multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) in Europe).
    These new venues, which can include the ominously-named dark pools, or alternative venues, where they can secretly match buy and sell orders, leads to, among other things, “deeply flawed” pricing for market participants, in Caldwell’s view.
    The idea of bank-backed stock trading venues is also suspect, says Caldwell.
    “Publicly-owned exchanges, open and visible trading, an auction market environment,” he said during the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit in New York.
    “These are centerpieces if you really want an economy to grow and you want to encourage entrepreneurs with access to capital. The more we get into gamesmanship and side products and all this other stuff it depletes from this.”
    (Posted by Jennifer Kwan)

It’s a puzzle M&A bankers and corporate executives have been trying to solve for years: how far from your home market can an acquisition take place and ultimately stumble over cultural differences? It’s a question that looms large as quintessentially Italian automaker Fiat prepares to swallow up Chrysler – inventor of the K-car and the minivan – and which reportedly haunts St Louis-based employees of Anheuser Busch in the aftermath of their company’s takeover by the penny pinching Belgians and Brazilians at InBev.

Gary Katz, CEO of Deutsche Boerse unit International Securities Exchange, insisted during his appearance at the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit that all has been sweetness and light since the Germans assumed control of the upstart American options exchange and that there has been “nearly zero turnover” since the takeover.

But Thomas Kloet, Chief Executive of Canadian exchange powerhouse TMX, was one of several executives at the summit who insisted that cross border mergers can often be a recipe for disaster and that the ideal mergers are “domestic roll-ups” like CME Group’s takeover of Nymex and the Chicago Board of Trade or indeed TSX Group’s takeover of the Montreal Exchange, which created TMX.

Implicitly criticizing some of the first-ever cross border deals in the sector like NYSE’s merger with Euronext, Kloet said: “there are significant regulatory differences that make cross border mergers pretty difficult to do, especially when they start passing over salt water, so to speak.”

Listen to the attached recording to hear the former ABN AMRO senior managing director’s ruminations on exchange M&A in full.

The emergence of off exchange stock trading in the United States in the past 10 years has eaten away at the market share of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq by breaking their duopoly.

But those two U.S.-based exchanges have had strong management to help them weather the storm, Liquidnet CEO Seth Merrin said at the Reuters Global Exchanges and Trading Summit.

Europe only last year began to allow competition for stock trading with the introduction of new European Union rules known as MiFID, which have forced the London Stock Exchange to slash prices.

But Merrin said that exchange CEO’s used to operating in a monopoly or duopoly are ill equipped to help navigate their businesses in a more competitive environment.

Merrin recalled telling Clara Furse, head of the London Stock Exchange, two years ago to get ready for competition.

“Even two years ago, they didn’t believe us- thought we were a fad,: Merrin said. “That’s why you see a Clara Furse go,” he said of the LSE head, who said in November she would step down. 

And Merrin lavished praise on the current management of the New York Stock Excahange, especially compared to a earlier head of the exchange:

“Can you imagine if (Dick) Grasso were still in charge of the Stock Exchange? It would, or could, be bankrupt today: they have excellent management.”

Unfortunately, we do.

All the infrastructure projects in the world sound great! They look awesome on paper, they’ll make people’s lives better and they’ll let us go visit our friends and families in about half the time it used to take.

It’ll be a dream world!!

Well, unfortunately, we are going to have to pay for all these projects at some point and all of the guests at this year’s Reuters Infrastructure Summit acknowledge that the paying is the hardest part.

But Professor Richard Little, from the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California, started off with the problem of paying and suggested a few different methods to be considered.

Little, one of those great guests who actually speaks in full thoughts and complete sentences, said that ideas of the moment that might be in vogue (like the public-private partnerships) are all well and good, but are only part of what the country is going to need to do to actually fix its many needs.

Little is an advocate for putting much of the pension, Social Security and defined benefit money to work for the nation’s infrastructure needs. Will it work? Well, for sure there’s a lot of money that can be used and he thinks the American investor would be more willing to buy bonds if they knew they were helping build a bridge or a school or improving rails.

Little was one of the featured speakers at the first day of the Summit, which continues through the end of the week in our New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC offices.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Or bridge. Or turnpike.

Every project we’re talking about at Reuters first-ever Reuters Infrastructure Summit has an enormous cost — sometimes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And governments are looking for ways to pay for it all.

Enter public-private partnerships (or P3s as we cool, infrastructure types like to say these days). In these deals, governments will lease or sell an asset to a group of investors for a certain big up-front fee and then they will pay the government a certain per-year fee for the right.

For Ambassador Felix Rohatyn, former executive at Lazard Freres and crafter of the New York City economic rescue in the mid-1970s, these are good ideas, but they don’t come without a cost.

Rohatyn, one of the featured guests at this year’s summit and author of a new book on big U.S. infrastructure projects called “Bold Endeavors“, said that in general P3s are a good thing as they should give governments more flexibility to do the things they need to do. But like everything, they carry some risk and officials should go into these deals with their eyes open.

The Reuters Infrastructure Summit continues through the end of this week in New York, San Francisco and Washington.

Infrastructure spending. Public-private partnerships. Government buildouts.

This week, all of these kinds of phrases are much on the mind of our guests at the first ever Reuters Infrastructure Summit held in New York, San Francisco and Washington.

While infrastructure means different things to almost all of our guests (schools, roads, bridges, etc) — one of our first guests, Petra Todorovich, talked at length about the need for high speed rails.

Todorovich, the director of the Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 project, told Reuters that buiding the high-speed rails makes a great deal of sense for travel, business and infrastructure.

What model would she use? Try the airlines. While equity investors might feel a cold wind blowing through their portfolios at the mention of the perpetually difficult-to-predict sector, Todorovich likes the way the industry melds its private side with its public financing.

Todorovich also spoke about other models for infrastructure spending that different locales have used.

Todorovich was one of the first speakers at this year’s summit, which runs through the end of this week.