And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why meaningful bank regulation is long overdue. This would sound a little less popular as: "Even if your college owns the la

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why meaningful bank regulation is long overdue. This would sound a little less popular as: "Even if your college owns the land under the Chrystler building and has entirely predictable cash flow for loan service, you should be unable to construct a new academic building which you sincerely, but perhaps unwisely, believe to be your most important priority, unless you can come up with $160 million in cold hard cash." I'm just finding it hard to square the narrative of sophisticated Wall Street operators conning low-sophistication average Americans into making wildly leveraged bets on real estate with the facts of this case, where (presumably) highly educated New Yorkers who own a lease with NPV of several hundred million dollars are assumed to be incapable of making a judgement call like "Do we want to build out facilities to support our core operations or not."