That poor performance, the worst in twenty years, has been attributed by some market observers to the abrupt return of office space to the market by technology firms and to delays by prospective tenants hoping that softening conditions will lower rents further. In this environment, noncurrent commercial real estate loans have edged up somewhat in the first quarter.
*** Smith's ideas fell on fertile ground and within a very few decades verged on conventional wisdom. The ancient political power of the landed gentry, the major beneficiaries of the older order, was giving way to a new class of merchants and manufacturers that was a product of the Industrial Revolution, which had begun a quarter-century earlier.