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The $1.5 Trillion Bill Comes Due: Navigating the 2026 CRE Maturity Wall
I used to walk past empty office buildings in downtown districts and think about the wasted potential. Now when I walk past them I think about the balance sheets. For the last few years the commercial real estate (CRE) market has been playing a high-stakes game of “Extend and Pretend.” Banks didn’t want to book losses and…
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U.S. Bancorp Acquires BTIG: A Signal for Bank M&A and ASC 805
I was recently listening to a podcast featuring Steve Eisman. If you don’t know the name, he is one of the key figures from The Big Short story regarding the Great Financial Crisis (played by Steve Carell in the movie). Eisman mentioned something that stuck with me. He noted that since 2008, M&A within the banking space…
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The Cantillon Effect: Why Wages Decoupled From Productivity in 1971
I was looking at a chart recently that you have probably seen floating around financial Twitter or LinkedIn. It tracks two lines: productivity and compensation. From 1948 until the early 1970s, these two lines moved in perfect lockstep. If workers produced more value, they got paid more money. It was a simple, logical correlation. But starting around…
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The Battle for Warner Bros: Paramount’s Hostile Takeover vs. The Netflix Deal
Is cash always king? You would think so. But when you dig into the corporate warfare happening right now between Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), Paramount Skydance, and Netflix, the answer gets complicated. I recently sat down to record a course update on M&A strategy because the situation changes almost daily. I wanted to understand why a board…
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2026 LLM Refresh: How AI Actually Works (Without the Hype)
I have seen a lot of articles recently riding various “hype trains” regarding how Artificial Intelligence is evolving. It feels like every week there is a new model that claims to be sentient or capable of human-level reasoning. I wanted to understand what is actually true. So, I did a bunch of research. I read…
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Are AI Layoffs Real? Analyzing the Narrative vs. The Numbers
I have noticed a strange pattern emerging on earnings calls lately. CFOs and CEOs keep repeating the same story: AI is driving efficiency, and that efficiency is the reason for recent layoffs. It makes for a clean narrative. It tells investors that the company is on the cutting edge and cutting costs simultaneously. But when…
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The 2025 Private Equity Paradox: Why Deals Are Up but Fundraising Is Down
I spend a lot of time reading research reports. Lately, I’ve been buried in data regarding Venture Capital (VC) and Private Equity (PE) for the start of 2025. While going through the SQ4 close-out numbers, something strange stood out to me. The headlines are screaming about a massive resurgence in PE deal activity. We are…
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2026 Predictions: The End of the Human Calculator?
When I started at PwC eight years ago, I kept hearing about the “reviewer shift.” The partners promised that technology would eventually handle the manual grunt work. They said first-year associates like me would stop being preparers and start being reviewers. For years, that felt like a corporate myth. We were still manually keying data and fighting…
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Navigating the Unknown: My Analysis of the 2026 Accounting Landscape
I’ve been poring over the economic reports for the start of 2026, and if I had to summarize the vibe in one phrase, it’s “wait and see.” After the chaos of late 2025—between the government shutdown, the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the policy shocks—I wanted to get a clear picture of what we, as finance…
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I Watched My Fiancé Waste Her Vacation on CPE. Here Is How To Fix It.
I spent my holiday break watching football and eating leftovers. My fiancé spent hers in purgatory. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, while we were supposed to be relaxing, she spent 10 hours glued to her laptop. She wasn’t watching Netflix. She was binge-watching professional education training because she left it until the end of the year.…
