Four years ago, when Tishman Speyer and BlackRock bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the $5.4bn deal was the biggest of its kind "in American history," according to the New York Times. It didn't work out so well.

Mainly because the real estate market crashed along with everything else and they failed to inflate rents to the ridiculous levels required to turn a profit in the face of resident outrage. Now the whole saga, which ends with the consortium $3bn in the red, looks like monumental folly.