Back in July, I wrote a post on the impending problems coming regarding commercial real estate. Well, it seems it’s ready to start showing its anger, and man, did it start off near the top.

Capmark Financial Group, one of the nation’s largest commercial real estate lenders, which also used to be known as GMAC Commercial Holding Corp, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy over the weekend, listing total debts of $21 billion and assets of $20.1 billion. Their banking system remains secure, but the main company states it needs time to restructure. They had posted a $1.6 billion loss for the last quarter.

These guys were heavy into bank rolling strip malls, something else I talked about when I wrote on why banks were closing. All over the country, you see both strip malls and larger malls that have a lot of empty space, with some having over 50% vacancies. It’s a similar thing to the regular real estate market, where these home builders felt if they built it buyers would come, and now there are thousands of homes in fancy developments that are practically worthless.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Another big time investor that’s predicted to probably be filing for some kind of bankruptcy in the next few weeks is New York City real estate firm Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty Advisors, who tried to bully tenants into giving up rent controlled apartments so they could build luxury apartments and charge top dollar. Instead, the tenants fought back, the judges sided with the tenants and found $200 million in increases illegal, and that’s probably going to be that.

At this point, it’s unknown what kind of impact the Capmark bankruptcy will have on jobs, other than those people who work for them. If they are funding construction projects in place right now, those will probably stop, in which case all those people will be out of work as well. What the trickle down for this will be isn’t known right now.

Brace yourself, people; it’s only just begun.

So it’s finally happened. After decades of bad decisions and being on the brink of it, General Motors has finally declared bankruptcy today. This giant, the maker of cars from groups such as Saturn and Pontiac, has come crashing down to earth like many of us who have run into financial difficulties, though not all of us can look at our history and say “we messed up.”

How did they mess up? I can only offer speculation and opinion, but in my mind, I think they messed up by forgetting something that other automobile makers forgot; people can only own so many cars. There’s only 300 million or so individuals in this country, only half of whom probably drive, and yet the average number of cars that have already been purchased is almost 2 cars per person. No one can drive two cars, and not everyone is a collector. Too many cars, too many dealers; almost like a Ponzi scheme, only GM was the sucker.

That’s number one. Number two, foreign auto makers came up with brilliant 10 year, 100,000 mile warranties, and made cars better so they wouldn’t be seeing us all the time. Not everyone makes it to the ten years, but they’re certainly making it past the 2-3 year period where car makers start sending those letters saying how they’ll give you a great trade in offer if you will bring your car back.

Three, gas mileage. I used to drive a Grand Prix, bright red, and loved it, but in regular driving I only got 19 miles a gallon. If I’d had that car last year,… well, I might not have gone broke, but I wouldn’t have been happy. Toyota’s average 30 MPG, and the Prius gets over 50 MPG; nice. GM? Hummer, 10 MPG; bad boys,…

GM filed Chapter 11, which means they won’t close, but they’re going to emerge a much leaner car company. Lean how; that’s the question. No matter what, though, the car industry has already changed, and one way or another, GM will either change with it, or this bankruptcy will be permanent.

Yes, we’re in tough economic times. However, we don’t have to sit around worrying about going broke all the time, or worry that things will never get better. As a matter of fact, there are numerous times when this type of thing has happened, and some very famous people have recovered from losing it all. That’s the premise of a news article in PopCrunch titled Bankrupt! 65 Famous People Who Lost It All.

Of course, in their story, some people lost it all and that was that. However, for my purposes, I’d like to highlight a few people who lost it all, then came back. However, if you’d like, check out the above story for more.

P. T. Barnum, the famous circus impresario, actually went bankrupt many years earlier when loans he’d made to a company working on developing East Bridgeport, Connecticut, went under, and he went under with them. However, he had built up great goodwill over his years, and many of his friends came together to help him raise money so that he could start over again, and the rest is history.

Francis Ford Coppola came back from bankruptcy twice. The first time, he was $300,000 in bankruptcy when The Godfather came out. The second time he had to declare bankruptcy when his movie One From The Heart (which I actually liked, though it was odd) flopped, and he had to borrow money from his mother to continue. However, he recovered quite nicely afterwards.

David Crosby had to file for bankruptcy in 1985 after his solo career wasn’t going so well. Of course, get back with your buds, record both a number one album and single, and it’s the good times once more.

Walt Disney had to declare bankruptcy after a company he was trying to start called Laugh-O-Gram failed after a couple of years in business (a precursor to singing telegrams; anyone still know what a telegram is?), and he left for Hollywoord, came up with a cartoon mouse, and the world changed forever.

Milton Hershey, the chocolate magnate, actually declared bankruptcy after four initial tries at starting a candy company, but he showed that perseverance in a dream could pay off, and, well, Hershey’s chocolate is one of my favorites.

Larry King had to declare bankruptcy in 1978, even though he was working in radio at the time, pounding away at the same career that he gets multi-millions a year for now at CNN.

Finally, two presidents had to file for bankruptcy in their lives, another one came close, and one of those after he got out of office, which would never happen in today’s world. Well, it might, if they exhibited behavior like Ulysses Grant, who had a major drinking problem, then developed cancer. He had to write a memoir to get out of bankruptcy not all that soon before he passed away. Abraham Lincoln actually was probably the one president with the most failures in his life, which included bankruptcy in 1833, and didn’t really find success until 1856, which led to him not only becoming president, but being named one of the top 10 presidents in history. Harry Truman came close to declaring bankruptcy when his haberdashery store went bust, but he found a way to pay all his bills and get out of debt.

There you go, some people who failed, then came back. The moral of this story is to never give up; you always have another chance to be someone special.

Yesterday, January 16th, Circuit City announced that they were closing all of their stores and liquidating their entire inventory. TFB talked about that in the post about did stores really do that badly. Anyway, the sales supposedly start later today, and will continue until the company decides they’ve been picked clean enough. By the way, they’re only closing the stores in the United States, which will put approximately 35,000 people out of work; the Canadian stores will remain open for the time being.

There will be a bunch of people heading to Circuit City stores across the country tomorrow, looking for big time deals on electronics. Many people will wait and hope that some of those items are still around in a couple of weeks when the discounts start getting bigger. Circuit City has already taken down their online store, though they may put it back up, because I’m betting they don’t want to have to shoulder the expense of sending anything through the mail. As it is, my bet is that from this point on every purchase will be non-refundable and non-returnable.

And that’s my problem with buying electronics from a store going out of business. It was fine when I bought supply items from drug stores or office products stores that were going out of business because I could store that stuff for a long time, and I didn’t have to worry about any of it breaking. When one buys items from an electronics store, often it’s not quite what you want or need, and it’s always nice to be able to take it back and swap it out for what you really needed. When you’re stuck with something you can’t use, when all you wanted to do was swap it for something else, you feel cheated, but hey, you knew the rules going in.

Another thing about going in too soon is that the real sales aren’t there yet. Some people don’t care, feeling that a 10% discount is a big deal, but my mind doesn’t quite work that way. The one thing I’ll be holding out for is a GPS for my wife, but I’m not buying anything that doesn’t have a 50% discount attached to it. At that point, I figure that if it’s damaged or doesn’t work properly, at least I didn’t get taken that badly.

What are your feelings of shopping at stores that have declared bankruptcy, and then what are your feelings when it pertains to technology or electronics? I’ll be interested in seeing what y’all have to say.