[Excerpt] Present at the Creation and Destruction of CMBS The fateful first week of August 2007, I found myself a consulting attorney to the major Wall Street law firm that creates commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), and which indeed helped to create CMBS at their inception in the 1980s. I worked with a team of nearly 100 global finance and capital markets lawyers, churning out multi-hundred million dollar issuances of CMBS nearly every week at the peak of the market in 2006 and 2007. The work involved analyzing vast pools of mortgages that had been assembled from all over the United States, preparing legal and financial reports on each potential CMBS issuance for the rating agencies, then complying with the complex securities regulations that allow CMBS to be sold on real estate capital markets around the world.