Rather than buying equity interests in buildings, TIAA-CREF and KTCU are seeking to invest in mortgages backed by office towers, retail properties, warehouses and apartments in major U.S. cities. The venture between the two companies, which manage teachers’ savings in their respective countries, is 51 percent owned by TIAA-CREF and 49 percent held by Seoul-based KTCU.
“You invest in a huge office tower in New York because you want a safe place to put your money and a decent return,” over the long-term, he said. “This is more a capital preservation play than it is a capital appreciation play.”
– From the Bloomberg article: Manhattan Towers Lure Koreans in $1 Billion Joint Venture
As soon as I woke up this morning, I saw an email from a very smart friend of mine in the finance industry. He forwarded me an article from the New York Post, about how TIAA-CREF had paid $3,158 per square foot for a building in the Meatpacking area of Manhattan (a record for the area), which isn’t far from where I lived for several years in the mid-2000s.
For those of you who aren’t aware, TIAA-CREF stands for Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – College Retirement Equities Fund. According to the company’s own website, it:
We specialize in the distinctive needs of those who work in the academic, research, medical and cultural fields. We’re here to listen to you, to advise you, and to help you feel confident about making financial decisions.
So it essentially manages the investments of people who know the least about investing, i.e., muppets. As such, it came as no surprise that TIAA-CREF might serve as an important bag-holding vehicle for bubble assets just before a fall, tempted by juicy 4% yields. As my friend noted: “In other words, teachers and nurses are shattering property records to fund their retirement.”
Here are some excerpts from the article:
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In North Carolina, managing the retirement savings of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public employees is big business. As the sole fiduciary of the state’s $90 billion pension fund, Treasurer Cowell, a Democrat, was recently named the world’s 18th most important institutional investor by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. The State Employees Association of North Carolina (Seanc) estimates that North Carolina is on track to spend a billion dollars a year of retirees’ pension money on fees to private financial firms. Roughly half of all North Carolina pension deals involve placement agents, and Seanc estimates that has generated roughly $180 million in placement agent fees — costs that are effectively paid by the pension fund, according to critics.
Longtime readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will know that I think the greatest parody of Wall Street ever created is courtesy of SNL about a made-up firm called Global Century Investments. Before I provide a link to the video, I want to highlight a stunning quote from 
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In 2014, I’ve focused extensively on America’s latest credit bubble due to the fact I believe we have now entered the final “crack-up boom” phase where things just get downright ridiculous. In early May, I wrote an article highlighting the triumphant return of some of the worst practices of the pre-financial crash era in the post: 
The effort to recreate the disaster of 2008, but on an even more colossal scale, is moving along at a brisk pace. In the past several months, we have seen the triumphant return of many of the worst practices of 2006/07 to such an extent that I have made it a key theme of this site in 2014. For those of you playing catchup, I suggest reading the following: