Interest‑rate side of the condition was met (no ~150 bps of cuts)
• At the start of 2024, the federal funds target range was 5.25%–5.50%. It stayed there until September 18, 2024, when the Fed cut by 50 bps to 4.75%–5.00%, then cut by 25 bps in November to 4.50%–4.75%, and again by 25 bps in December to 4.25%–4.50%. That’s 100 basis points of easing in 2024, not the roughly 150 bps Sacks cited as the market’s expectation. (investinglive.com)
→ So the antecedent of his conditional (“if rates don’t come down as expected (~150 bps) in 2024”) did occur.

Commercial real‑estate sponsors did see broad distress
• By year‑end 2024, CMBS data show office and multifamily borrowers under significant strain: Trepp reports the overall CMBS delinquency rate at 6.57%, with office delinquency at a record 11.01% in December 2024 and more than $2 billion of office loans becoming newly delinquent that month alone. (trepp.com)
• KBRA finds office delinquencies in its CMBS universe more than doubled year‑over‑year to 10.76%, with an office “distress rate” (delinquent + specially serviced) near 15% by December 2024, and $2.5 billion of loans added to distress that month, over half due to actual or imminent maturity default. (businesswire.com)
• The Financial Stability Board likewise noted that, as of September 2024, distress was “evident in multiple segments” of the CMBS market, with office and retail segments showing the highest distress rates. (ft.com)
→ This supports the idea that a large number of commercial real‑estate sponsors were indeed “in trouble” by late 2024.

But a large number of regional banks did not end up in serious distress in 2024
• FDIC data show only two U.S. bank failures in all of 2024: Republic First Bank (Philadelphia, ~$6B in assets) on April 26, and First National Bank of Lindsay (Oklahoma, ~$108M in assets) on October 18. (fdic.gov)
– The First National Bank of Lindsay was closed after regulators found “false and deceptive bank records” and suspected fraud that depleted its capital—i.e., primarily a fraud/management issue, not a CRE‑rate shock story. (occ.treas.gov)
– Republic First’s failure was tied to longer‑running profitability, funding, and interest‑rate pressures; news coverage frames it as one more isolated smaller‑lender failure, not part of a broad wave of regional bank collapses. (forbes.com) • The FDIC’s Q3 2024 update reported 68 “problem banks” on its list—up, but still a historically moderate share of the thousands of U.S. banks. The same report emphasized that the sector’s capital and overall resilience remained solid, even as non‑performing CRE loans rose to their highest level since 2013. (reuters.com)
• S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 2024 CRE outlook described banks as “feeling stress but weathering the storm.” Its analysis of roughly $950 billion of CRE mortgages maturing in 2024 concluded that while banks with heavy CRE exposure would “feel some pain,” it was not expected to trigger large‑scale deleveraging or threaten overall financial stability. (press.spglobal.com)
• Credit‑rating agencies did flag and downgrade several CRE‑heavy regionals (e.g., Moody’s putting at least six regional banks on review, and S&P revising outlooks to negative for five others), citing ongoing asset‑quality and profitability pressure from CRE. But these are dozens of institutions out of a large regional‑bank universe, and the typical language is about elevated risk and earnings pressure rather than imminent failure or wholesale restructurings. (investmentnews.com)
• Trade and industry pieces near year‑end 2024 characterize regional banks as under “pressure” and increasingly modifying CRE loans, but they frame problems as building into 2025 (with a big 2025–26 maturity wall) rather than a 2024 wave of bank distress. (credaily.com)
→ In other words, there was notable stress, downgrades, and caution around CRE‑heavy regionals in 2024, but not a large‑scale crisis where “a lot” of regional banks entered serious financial distress (defaults, forced restructurings, or FDIC resolutions) during that calendar year.

Overall assessment
• The if part of Sacks’s conditional is satisfied: the Fed did not deliver the ~150 bps of 2024 cuts that markets had anticipated—only about 100 bps. (foxbusiness.com)
• The then part is mixed: commercial real‑estate sponsors—especially office borrowers with floating or maturing debt—were clearly under broad, measurable stress by late 2024. (trepp.com)
• However, the specific follow‑through he predicted—“and in turn there’s a lot of regional banks who are in trouble” in 2024—did not materialize at the scale implied. Actual 2024 bank failures were few and idiosyncratic, regulators and analysts repeatedly described the banking sector as generally resilient, and CRE‑related problems were framed more as a rising risk and future‑default pipeline than as a contemporaneous wave of serious regional‑bank distress.

Because his conditional hinges on both widespread sponsor trouble and a resulting wave of regional‑bank distress in 2024, and the second component did not occur in that year, the prediction is best judged as wrong overall, albeit directionally right about mounting CRE sponsor stress and elevated risk for CRE‑heavy regional banks.