Hi, just leave on work now. Sorry, it's a bit loud.

Um, basically, so I was thinking we could get Macies tonight. Had a big Mac on my mind all day, and delivery fee on the app is now from 99P. So you win? Of course you are. Love you. Bye! Exclusively on the McDonald's app. 18 plus, service fee and small order fee may apply. Participating restaurants. Serving times and teas and seas apply. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not Arroyd's news.

So there's definitely a lot of concerns around central banks.

At the moment, they're not, they sound calm.

But since they're going to cut interest rates anyway, at some point, they might just accelerate

if they see that the sector is starting to crack.

Empty offices and shopping malls struggling to find tenants.

This is the sad state of commercial property.

How banks, central banks and investors can navigate this crisis

is the focus of this week's Viewer Room.

Welcome back to the Viewsroom, a podcast from Reuters' breaking views where columnists from around the world talk about the big stories of the week. I'm your host, Amy Donlin, coming to you from London.

Commercial property is a market that appears to be in prices. In the US, there's a staggering 20%

vacancy rate following a post-pandemic boom in hybrid working. Meanwhile, in Europe, the collapse

of embattled Austrian real estate group Signeur is spreading to banks like Deutsche Vanbrief Bank

in Germany and even forced the departure of the CEO of Swiss wealth manager Julius Baer.

I'm fortunate to be joined by two Breaking Views of powerhouses, John Foley, who leads Breaking Views financial coverage globally, as well as Francesco Guerrera, Global Head of Economics Breaking Views.

So Francesco and John, the three of us have all been writing about commercial property and such is the scale of what seems to be a bit of a crisis.

But John, I think I'll start with you.

When did you first start seeing cracks appear in commercial property? Because we obviously, the pandemic, all the offices

emptied out, shopping malls, you know, didn't have anybody in them. When did you start to

think about this as actually an area that would be problematic for banks and elsewhere.

Yeah, I mean, this problem has been creeping up for a long time. So we've known for quite a long

...