Business
What Will Become of Cities?
From the Brownstone Institute
Everyone was supposed to be back at the office by now. It’s not really happening, however, and this has huge implications for the future of the American city.
Part of the reason is the cost, not only the finances of commuting but also the time. Another contributing factor is the crime and homeless population, which can be quite scary. Between inflation, rising poverty, substance abuse, and rampant post-lockdown incivility, the cities have become far less attractive. The impact on the commercial sector is becoming ever more clear.
Leases are coming up for large office spaces in major cities around the US. But there is a serious problem on the way. Occupancy of these offices is dramatically down in most places around the country. The decline is 30 percent on average and much more in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. That’s for now but many tech companies and others have laid off workers, meaning that even the companies that renew will be looking to downsize dramatically and with shorter-term leases.
Dylan Burzinski of Green Street writes in the Wall Street Journal:
“What began as a two-week work-from-home experiment in March 2020 evolved into an entrenched hybrid/remote work environment. Despite return-to-office mandates, office-utilization rates (how many people are physically in an office on any given day) have failed to pick up meaningfully this year and are still 30% to 40% below 2019 levels for most office markets across the country. Employers have shed office space as a result, helping send the amount of office space available for lease shooting up to historic highs across most major U.S. cities. The so-called availability rates are hovering at 25% on average compared with slightly above 15% before Covid—and things could get worse before they get better.”
You might say: there is nothing wrong with remote work. This would have happened regardless. Cities as we know them will pass into the night eventually as the whole world becomes digital.
That might be true in the long term, but it would have been far better to happen organically and not by force. That was the essence of what Burzinski calls the “pandemic” but of course it wasn’t a pathogen that sent millions out of the cities and leaving for the suburbs. It was the forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status.
For a time, cities like New York City, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans were using state power to exclude shot refuseniks any normal public accommodations. The unvaccinated could not go to the library, the theater, restaurants and bars, and museums. It’s hard to believe that this actually happened in the land of the free but that is the real history of just two years ago.
Then once workers got a taste of remote work, and they fully realized just how ridiculously annoying the commute and office culture truly is, they would not and could not be pushed back into a full-time relationship with the office. That has left half and fully empty skyscrapers in multiple cities in the US.
The signs of doom are everywhere. A poll of New Yorkers has 60% saying that life quality is falling and this is in part due to far less quality foot traffic. San Francisco has record office vacancies. Even large cities in Texas have 25% vacancies. Population declines in many cities are continuing long after pandemic restrictions have been lifted.
And here is Boston.com:
Absent flexibility from building owners, businesses worry that downtown will see even more vacancies and that tourists and office workers slowly returning to the neighborhood will have less reason to make the trip. Consider the worst-case scenario: Downtown falls further into post-pandemic disarray or a long-feared “doom loop.”
Like many big-city downtowns, Boston is still in the midst of its recovery after COVID. Many offices and ground-floor spaces remain empty, and buildings lately have sold for sizable losses. Fears about what downtown will become were only exacerbated by the bankruptcy of the coworking giant WeWork, one of the largest office tenants in Boston.
How far this will go and what the implications will be is anyone’s guess. Will the skylines change? Are we looking at demolitions of some of the grandest structures in the coming years? It’s not entirely out of the question. Economic reality can be like a brick wall: when the expense consistently outpaces the revenue, something has to change.
Why not convert office spaces to domestic apartments? It’s not so easy. The buildings put up after the Second World War were made for air conditioning and had wide footprints without windows in a large swath of the space. That simply doesn’t work for apartments. Cutting a giant hole down the middle is technically possible but economically expensive, requiring the rents in the resulting properties to be in the luxury range.
The next phase will be the fiscal crisis. Dying business districts, declining population, empty office buildings all mean falling tax revenue. The budgets won’t be cut because of pension obligations and school funding. The next place to look is to the capital for bailouts and then of course the federal government. But those will only buy time and certainly won’t address the underlying problem.
What bugs me most about this is just how much it fits with the dream of Anthony Fauci as he and his co-author explained back in August of 2020. Writing months after lockdowns, with American cities on fire with protests, he wrote that we need “radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
If your view is that the real problem with infectious disease traces to “the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago,” as they claim, you are going to have a serious problem with cities. Recall that this is the guy who said we need to stop shaking hands, forever. The notion of a million people working and socializing together in a few square miles of space is something that would run contrary to the entire vision.
Klaus Schwab of the WEF, too, has an issue with large cities, too, of course, with constant complaints about urbanization and the imagined world in which large swaths of our lives are spent online rather than with friends.
So a tremendous downscaling of cities might have been part of the plan all along. You will notice that none of the cities on the chopping block seem to be offering a viable plan for saving themselves. They could dramatically cut taxes, deregulate childcare, open up more schooling options, turn police attention to petty crime and carjacking instead of traffic fines, and open up zoning. That’s not happening.
New York is going the opposite direction, having effectively banned AirBnB in the city. Why did the city council do this? Because too many renters with space found it more lucrative to offer short-term rentals and overnight stays rather than make long-term contracts for residents. This is a sneaky way of pillaging property owners, not exactly a good plan for attracting real estate investment.
All of this speaks to a much bigger problem, which is that the whole political system seems to be engaged in an amazing game of “Let’s pretend” despite the overwhelming evidence of the disaster that has befallen us. No serious efforts are underway to reverse the damage of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates and segregation. This is partly because there has been zero accountability or even honest public debate about what governments around the country did from 2020-2022. We live amidst the carnage but justice seems farther off than ever.
Yes, a complete reversal is possible but it seems ever less likely, especially with the continued efforts to purge from public life those who dissented during the crisis, as well as the intensifying censorship on all mainstream media platforms.
Once you step back from it, nothing really makes sense. One might suppose that when a whole society – and really globe – embarked on such a crazy experiment and utterly failed in every way, that there would be a major effort to come to terms with it.
The opposite is happening. Even with America’s treasured cities in such grave danger, so much of it provoked by terrible policies over four years, we are still supposed to either not notice or chalk it all up to some inexorable forces of history of which no one has any control.
Author
Illustration by Daniel Medina
By Eric Salzman
The smartest guys in the room fall for the same scam twice in less than 5 years
THE SCHEME: Fraud and Money Laundering
THE COMPANY: Stenn Technologies
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THE NEWS: For the second time in five years, a scam involving sexing up a boring, centuries old financing business blew up in the faces of some of the world’s largest banks
You know the old saying. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
In December, “fintech” supply chain financier Stenn Technologies and its subsidiaries Stenn Assets UK Ltd and Stenn International Ltd, collapsed, spanking investors and lenders such as Citigroup, Nexis, BNP Paribas, HSBC and private equity firm Centerbridge. Just a month prior to the blow-up, Stenn was viewed as a fintech unicorn with a robust $1 billion book of business, poised for strong growth.
As we’ve seen time and again, a unicorn can quickly die when a company’s business model screams fraud to anyone bothering to look.
Stenn Technologies claimed to use artificial intelligence and state of the art technology to analyze credit and money laundering risk in order to turn a low margin, supply chain financing business into an awesome, high return, low risk securitized product.
Here’s a quick explanation of supply chain financing:
1. A company delivers its product to a buyer and the buyer promises to pay in a few months’ time, creating an accounts receivable.
2. The company that has the accounts receivable sends it to the supply chain financier (Greensill Capital or Stenn Technologies).
3. The supply chain financier pays the company cash for the receivable minus a discount which is another business practice called factoring.
4. The buyer pays the financier the full amount of the receivable on the due date.
Supply chain financing is nothing new. It was probably around when Marco Polo set out for the Orient.
If it sounds boring, that’s because it is, or at least is supposed to be. Lex Greensill’s Greensill Capital changed that a decade ago.
Through fancy structuring, as well as four private jets, Greensill created a byzantine circular loop where money flowed around the world, much of it to Greensill favorites like steel maker Sanjeev Gupta and then back again. The operation was continuously funded by either GAM, Credit Suisse, SoftBank as well as Greensill’s own German bank, Greensill Bank AG. After a while, as more money poured into Greensill from eager investors, the company began to essentially just lend money out, mostly to Gupta while calling the transactions “future receivables.”
Greensill Capital collapsed under the weight of fraud in 2021, costing its big investors mentioned above billions. Matt reported on the story here in 2021.
Greensill’s receivable notes (the fancy structuring) were insured by a number of insurers, the biggest being Japanese insurer Tokio Marine. The insurance made investors comfortable because, if Tokio Marine insured it, the notes have to be money good, right?
Wrong.
At one point, Tokio had nearly $8 billion of exposure to Greensill deals. How insurers got comfortable with insuring receivables to a blizzard of shell companies that all seemed to point back to Gupta and Lex’s pockets is anyone’s guess, but when Tokio finally did a good look under the hood, they cried insurance fraud and Greensill came crashing down. Credit Suisse investors alone lost $10 billion.
At this point, we need to hear from Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, better known as Scotty.
So now, we’re at the shame on you portion of the story.
Astoundingly, Stenn Technologies was able to pull off a similar scam just a couple of years later, posing as a fintech company, supposedly using the latest in technology to do global supply chain financing faster and better than everyone else in the business.
The victims are new, but given the high publicity of Greensill’s failure, you’d figure they would catch on.
According to Bloomberg News, “Stenn’s main backers were Citigroup Inc., BNP Paribas SA, Natixis and HSBC Holdings Plc while Barclays Plc, M&G Plc and Goldman Sachs Group also backed the transaction.”
Private equity firm Centerbridge invested $50 million in capital and valued the company at $900 million in 2022.
In 2022, TechCrunch described the secret sauce that Stenn was supposedly using to bring a 13th century business into the modern age.
Stenn — which applies big data analytics, taking a few datapoints about a business (the main two being what money it has coming in and going out based on invoices) and matching them up against an algorithm that takes some 1,000 other factors into account to determine its eligibility for a loan of up to $10 million; and on the other side taps a network of institutions and other big lenders to provide the capital for that financing.
Perhaps this multi-factor algorithm was super cool when they showed it to investors and lending partners. The only problem was Stenn, in the words of a business crime attorney who spoke to Bloomberg, “has all the hallmarks of both fraud and money laundering.”
Greensill might have been a bit hard to figure out with large, respected insurance companies insuring their notes.
But anyone who took the time to investigate Stenn Technologies by simply looking at the data they pumped out to investors weekly would have seen the scheme for what it was.
While it appears the previously mentioned institutional investors didn’t bother to investigate, Bloomberg did and the results were darkly hilarious.
Some of Stenn’s biggest suppliers were tiny companies in Thailand and Hong Kong with little in common yet corporate filings for all of them list the same Russian name as a backer. One in Singapore was accused by the U.S. of enabling payments to Russian naval intelligence and sanctioned in August. Tracing a group owned by another Russian investor that was supposedly shipping millions of dollars of goods to corporations in Switzerland and Canada led to a derelict Prague building with boarded-up windows.
Bloomberg contacted the largest 50 firms that were supposedly the buyers for what Stenn’s suppliers produced, and the bulk had no idea who Stenn Technologies or these suppliers were! A spokesman for Edion Corp., one of the biggest electronics retailers in Japan, told Bloomberg, “we have absolutely no knowledge of this matter. We really have no idea what it’s about.”
Essentially, the data produced by Stenn highlighted thousands of bogus transactions on a weekly basis to investors, lying about who was paying and who was receiving billions of dollars of funds. According to Bloomberg, investors received these details with the name of the suppliers and buyers included. Therefore, at any time, investors could have done a sanity check on these obscure suppliers to see who they were, or in this case, weren’t.
HSBC finally caught up to what Stenn was doing. Again from the Bloomberg report:
HSBC triggered Stenn’s downfall when it lodged an application to the UK courts, alleging that its officials had uncovered ‘deeply troubling issues on a large scale.’ The
invoices at the heart of the deal weren’t ‘genuine debts’ and payments to suppliers weren’t coming from ‘blue-chip companies’ but from bogus firms with similar names, according to the complaint filed by the London-based bank.
Investors are facing a potential loss of $200 million, although it could be a lot more as $978 million in invoiced-financed notes are outstanding, Bloomberg reports.
There is a bright side to Stenn’s collapse though. A senior trade finance official told The Sunday Times:
“The saving grace here is at least it’s smaller than Greensill.”
Well played.
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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Scott McGregor warns that Chinese hybrid warfare is no longer hypothetical—it’s unfolding in Canada now. TD Bank’s closure of CCP-linked accounts highlights the rising infiltration of financial interests. From cyberattacks to guanxi-driven influence, Canada’s institutions face a systemic threat. As banks sound the alarm, Ottawa dithers. McGregor calls for urgent, whole-of-society action before foreign interference further erodes our sovereignty.
Chinese hybrid warfare isn’t coming. It’s here. And Canada’s response has been dangerously complacent
The recent revelation by The Globe and Mail that TD Bank has closed accounts linked to pro-China groups—including those associated with former Liberal MP Han Dong—should not be dismissed as routine risk management. Rather, it is a visible sign of a much deeper and more insidious campaign: a hybrid war being waged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across Canada’s political, economic and digital spheres.
TD Bank’s move—reportedly driven by “reputational risk” and concerns over foreign interference—marks a rare, public signal from the private sector. Politically exposed persons (PEPs), a term used in banking and intelligence circles to denote individuals vulnerable to corruption or manipulation, were reportedly among those flagged. When a leading Canadian bank takes action while the government remains hesitant, it suggests the threat is no longer theoretical. It is here.
Hybrid warfare refers to the use of non-military tools—such as cyberattacks, financial manipulation, political influence and disinformation—to erode a nation’s sovereignty and resilience from within. In The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard, co-authored with Ina Mitchell, we detailed how the CCP has developed a complex and opaque architecture of influence within Canadian institutions. What we’re seeing now is the slow unravelling of that system, one bank record at a time.
Financial manipulation is a key component of this strategy. CCP-linked actors often use opaque payment systems—such as WeChat Pay, UnionPay or cryptocurrency—to move money outside traditional compliance structures. These platforms facilitate the unchecked flow of funds into Canadian sectors like real estate, academia and infrastructure, many of which are tied to national security and economic competitiveness.
Layered into this is China’s corporate-social credit system. While framed as a financial scoring tool, it also functions as a mechanism of political control, compelling Chinese firms and individuals—even abroad—to align with party objectives. In this context, there is no such thing as a genuinely independent Chinese company.
Complementing these structural tools is guanxi—a Chinese system of interpersonal networks and mutual obligations. Though rooted in trust, guanxi can be repurposed to quietly influence decision-makers, bypass oversight and secure insider deals. In the wrong hands, it becomes an informal channel of foreign control.
Meanwhile, Canada continues to face escalating cyberattacks linked to the Chinese state. These operations have targeted government agencies and private firms, stealing sensitive data, compromising infrastructure and undermining public confidence. These are not isolated intrusions—they are part of a broader effort to weaken Canada’s digital, economic and democratic institutions.
The TD Bank decision should be seen as a bellwether. Financial institutions are increasingly on the front lines of this undeclared conflict. Their actions raise an urgent question: if private-sector actors recognize the risk, why hasn’t the federal government acted more decisively?
The issue of Chinese interference has made headlines in recent years, from allegations of election meddling to intimidation of diaspora communities. TD’s decision adds a new financial layer to this growing concern.
Canada cannot afford to respond with fragmented, reactive policies. What’s needed is a whole-of-society response: new legislation to address foreign interference, strengthened compliance frameworks in finance and technology, and a clear-eyed recognition that hybrid warfare is already being waged on Canadian soil.
The CCP’s strategy is long-term, multidimensional and calculated. It blends political leverage, economic subversion, transnational organized crime and cyber operations. Canada must respond with equal sophistication, coordination and resolve.
The mosaic of influence isn’t forming. It’s already here. Recognizing the full picture is no longer optional. Canadians must demand transparency, accountability and action before more of our institutions fall under foreign control.
Scott McGregor is a defence and intelligence veteran, co-author of The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard, and the managing partner of Close Hold Intelligence Consulting Ltd. He is a senior security adviser to the Council on Countering Hybrid Warfare and a former intelligence adviser to the RCMP and the B.C. Attorney General. He writes for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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