As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we present our Golden Turkey Awards. In a year of monumentally bad surprises, we truly had difficulty narrowing our list down to only the exceptionally worthy candidates. Voters, governments and regulators sent shockwaves throughout the world in 2016, upending markets and throwing much of what we thought we knew into the proverbial dumpster fire of society. If what we know now we knew when we last gave the Golden Turkey Awards, we may have taken a pass on 2016. It can’t get any worse, right? As we get ready to step into the unknown of 2017, here is our list for 2016:

The Darwin Award…

…goes to the United Kingdom! In a breathtaking display of self-destruction, the UK shocked the world earlier this year by voting to Brexit. The Brexit victory sent markets into a tailspin and put the fundamental viability of the European Union into question. Immediately, banks and other UK based companies began planning to move to greener pastures. And then the UK shared its national treasure, Nigel Farage, with America! The markets have calmed, and like after other recent black swans, the world has hiked itself up by its boot straps and continues to march along. As we had speculated in the past, Brexit might turn out to be worse for continental Europe than maybe for Britain. It’s going to be an interesting year, but if sometime late next spring, Mrs. May calls up President Le Pen to have a chat, there may be no EU to leave.

The “Here, Hold My Beer” Award…

…goes to the good old USA who just did something …special in this election. We certainly didn’t cover ourselves with glory as the leading democracy in the world as we took name-calling to new heights over the past 18 months. The folks, or at least some portion of them, voted for change and it seems like we’re going to get it. Was this the genius of the common man, or was this a collective brain fart? I guess we’ll find out in the year to come. Volatility is not always bad, right?

The Shyness of Confidence Award…

…goes to CRE finance industry. What in hell happened to us in 2016? The year started with the best of intentions. We were going to have a bang up year between the wall of refinancings and regulatory change lurking at its end. It looked like 2016 was the year to rock and roll. What happened? We’ve turtled on risk retention, we’ve been in thrall to market volatility and we have become inert in the face of uncertainty. The proverbial donkey starving to death between two bales of hay. Nothing really explains what went wrong in 2016. I guess then, that we can hope that 2017 surprises on the upside.

The When All You Have is a Hammer Award…

…goes to the global central bankers. Interest rates in many developed nations remain at, or below, zero. While the Fed raised rates in December 2015, the other four interest rate increases the Fed projected for 2016 did not materialize. When the Fed finally gets around to raising rates (gotta be December, right?), we all could be in for a rude awakening. But fear not, the U.S. is not alone in pushing interest rates beyond the zero bound. Misery does love company, lemmings never leap off cliffs alone. So be of good cheer. But…will interest rates and easy money policies now running rampant around the world lead to new bubbles? Actually, how can it not? It just doesn’t seem plausible that low interest rates are sustainable in the long term, so we best prepare for some interest rate pain. Our central bankers remain steadfast in treating our economic malaise as something only they can solve. Not sure whether I hope they are right or wrong.

The “Yes sir, may I have another” Award…

Each new special little regulatory something birthed by Dodd-Frank or delivered from on high by Basil has been met either with silence or at best with indistinct quiet mumbling from the banking community. Ok, there’s no such thing as a fair fight with one’s regulators, so I get the diffidence. But it seems no one is really interested in standing up to say that the world is indeed round. It would be awfully nice if someone did. Will the regulatory estate and their academic enablers finally declare victory when banks stop lending entirely? That’d be super safe, right? Could someone please stand up and point out that the cycle cannot be legislated away, that more and more capital has a cost, that indeed prudential regulations have a cost? This regulatory bear hug is brought to us by the same instinct that puts “Not Safe For Highway Speed” warnings on tricycles and sends little Johnny to school with a football helmet on his head and pads on his knees and elbows.

The “Hokey Pokey” Award…

…goes to the EU! First you bail-in, then you don’t bail-out, you do the hokey pokey and you spin yourself around, that’s what the EU is all about! While banking in Europe remains incredibly challenging, all the governmental tinkering seems to be can-kicking. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal just last week that there were $360 billion of bad loans in the Italian banking system, almost a trillion EU wide. Yikes! If contagion weren’t real, this little tragedy in the EU banking sector might just be interesting, but it’s not. Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan just asked for Europe to have its own banking rules. They don’t even like Basel III! Somehow these rules coming out of Basel just don’t work in Europe. Curious, curious.   And now this: Brussels has just released a new batch of financial proposals that seem, on the one hand, as flimsily disguised smack at London, but also creates a ring wall of protection around the European banks. So, if you can’t fix your own banks, keep the competitors out? There’s a strategy for economic success.

The Award for Best Post Election Dodge in the Age of Trump…

…goes to my very best friend who told me, some time ago about how to answer any awkward question. Whatever silly, contentious or impossible thing you are told, you say, “Well, there you go.” Think about it. The Cubs finally won the World Series with the help of the Chicago wiccan community. “Well, there you go.” “The government has aliens locked up in Area 59.” “Well, there you go.” “Three million North Korean agents voted in Wisconsin for Trump in the election.” “Well, there you go.” It’s the perfect response. It’s neither laden with opprobrium or benediction. “Mr. Trump is going to ruin the country.” “Well, there you go.” Half of your audience thinks you’re a fan, half your audience thinks you’re saddened. It’s gotten me through many a cocktail party.

The Delphi Award…

…goes to our regulators. I say this with more than a whiff of irony, but why won’t my regulators talk to me? I’ve spent the last year and a half of my professional life trying to understand risk retention and trying to suss out what was okay and what wasn’t. There’s a lot of easy questions here, and really all we want is answers; some clarity (okay, maybe that’s not all we want). Why won’t you talk to me? At least the Oracle at Delphi had the excuse of being stoned on magic mushrooms and while I’m sure being a regulator is fun, I don’t think they get to do that. Just a wink, a knowing nod suggesting that a position is not wholly without merit. Come on! Dechert and the other major law firms in the space published FAQs this past summer. We didn’t go very far out on the proverbial limb here folks. We tried to come up with answers that made sense to what we thought were easy questions. Hello? You there? So tell us what you think! It’s not a trick! It would really help us make capital markets function and it would help achieve the goals of Dodd-Frank. The Oracle at Delphi muttered and meandered for the better part of 1500 years. I hope it doesn’t take us that long to get clarity here.

The Black Matter Matters Award…

…goes to the Fed (honorable mention to the Bank of England and the ECB). Someone explain this to me: How has the Federal Reserve, through four rounds of quantitative easing and God knows what else, pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to have it evanesce and disappear? How do you do that and not generate inflation? We’ve got lots of fine economists and they chatter a lot about the money supply. (I mean, really, what else do they have to do?) Oh sure, I’ve heard that the velocity of money has decreased or that the banks have packed their accounts at the Federal Reserve with sterilized dollars, but it just doesn’t seem a sufficient answer. Maybe it’s like black matter. It’s there for sure; we just can’t see it, feel it, appreciate it or certainly not enjoy it. And now we have the Schadenfreude pleasure of watching the ECB do exactly the same thing with exactly the same outcome. Here’s what I’m afraid of: I’m afraid that while we didn’t actually experience any of the joys and benefits of an expansion of the economy when the money got pumped in, we may get to appreciate all of the discomfort and indeed horror of the experience when the money gets drained out. We may indeed need black matter to live. Mr. Trump, feel free to drain the swamp, but be really careful about draining the money supply.