When covid hit and people started working from home the first thing I thought was ‘what is going to happen to the commercial mortgage backed securities market’? In 2008 the financial crisis was caused because banks took all the residential home loans and bundled them into securities, and then sold traunches off to investment funds. The Collateralized Debt Obligations were ‘insured’ with credit default swaps. But they were filled with junk loans and eventually they imploded, the CDS insurance couldnt cover the loss because the issues didn’t have minimum liquidity reserve requirements. A CDS is an over the counter agreement so it’s not regulated.
Fast forward to now. Same deal, but this time with commercial mortgage backed securities. The balloon is about to pop and they are desperate to force people to return to the office because they want to save the banks. They don’t want to 'improve productivity ’ they want to save the investor class.
My company just had a web conference for upper management where they talked about how sad workers were that they couldn’t see each other when remote working. They didn’t even try to frame it as a productivity thing, they just wanted to make it sound like an employee well being effort.
Of all the issues raised to me during the pandemic, not once did “I’m sad I can’t see my coworkers” come up.