some enormous percentage, 50%, 60%, of all the institutional real estate was sold and, therefore, releveragedl of that is under water. on the other hand, with interest rates where they are, you have people being able to carry the mortgage, so i don't think you'll see any significant foreclosures of institutional assets until the point at which they can't cover. and i think that's probably two to three years away. >> so you look around the world. where do you think real estate is two to three years from now? you mentioned real estate the last time we spoke. >> yes. i guess i would say my number one country in the world for investment is brazil. and we have a very significant real estate presence in brazil. and it's growing. our enthusiasm for brazil is one. it's elective. it's leftist, and we like them. two, it's got 180 million people so it has scale. three, it's energy self-sufficient. four, it's commodity self-sufficient. and they have an educated and trained work force. >> let me switch gears, sam, you are a man that wears many hats, one of them head of tribune. i know you probably hate th

so this story, this kind of releveraging story i think has got a little bit more to play out. again, we're not long-term bullish on the state of the u.s. economy, but from a short-term tactical standpoint we've been playing upside call spreads in the s&p. >> so what are you buying for your clients now? what sectors are you buying? you're buying calls, did you say, in the s&p? ? that's right. >> that's a bullish position short term.. >> exactly. a few things. first thing, the vix is literally 50% of its level back in march. so you get much more exposure with a low vix than you get with a high vix. so you can buy a lot of options. we're still playing the s&p because we think the markets's still moving in a very correlated fashion. this is still a market where the macro considerations are still very important. >> you're getting a lot of bang for your buck because options are cheaper -- >> exactly. >> but what sectors are you buying? >> on the short side we still think the end demand from the consumer standpoint is not there. my colleague danny kirsch put out a piece this morning

jobless, creditless, low income environment, what we need is improving homeowner confidence and releveraging to improve. so clearly, things are normalizing, but they're far from normal. what we've got from the net lending data is that things are still shrinking which is no surprise, given that the balance sheets are clogged with defaults for mortgages and the secondary market are still very much sdrurpted. also, another voice of caution coming yesterday, i think it was, from the acb mechanic mersch, a couple of the comments we heard saying we should not be overcome by optimism. the danger of a renewed downturn isn't over and the investment slump has been compensated by public spending. while that is still the case, we shouldn't take away from growth. should we take away from that that investors are getting carried away? >> indeed, the last five months and the last five years. a decline rally in stock markets is shared by optimism of the market compared to fundamentals. fundamentals tends to lag behind financial valuations. in the short-term, we've seen dramatic improvement in the global econ