The question of what to do with commercial buildings weighed down by mid-2000s vintage securitized debt is one that's going to have to be worked through building by building and loan by loan, it seems. But there are going to be some bellwether cases, such as Maguire Properties Inc., which is the process of relinquishing ownership of a portfolio of prominent Los Angeles-area office buildings.

It's a matter of staying afloat for Maguire. "Today's announcement of board approval of management’s plan to dispose of the seven assets in cooperation with lenders is the next step in our efforts over the last 14 months to manage our liquidity," said Nelson Rising, Maguire president & CEO, during the company's conference call on Monday.

In answering a question, Rising further asserted that the company is "not considering bankruptcy, and we feel that of course we are on is for better that course of action."

The properties that Maguire will be relinquishing include seven buildings totaling about 4.2 million square feet of office space, plus 100,000 square feet of retail. The total debt on the assets is about $1.06 billion, maturing at various dates.

Four of the properties were part of Maguire's acquisition of 24 EOP/Blackstone assets in April 2007, which was pretty much near the top of the bubble. The other properties were bought earlier, one as part of the acquisition of the Commonwealth portfolio in 2005 and two others in 2004.

Maguire also reported that it lost $357.7 million in the second quarter of 2009, or $7.95 per share, compared with a loss of $105.9 million, or $2.32 a share, during the same period a year earlier. The company's funds from operations, an important metric among REITs, was a loss of $7.10 a share, up from a loss of $1.18 a share a year ago.

Times have also been hard for booksellers with physical stores, a trend that stared before the recession, as consumers turned to Internet booksellers. But there's some life left in the retail bookstore model, if Monday's move by Barnes & Noble Inc. is any indication.

The 750-store chain is buying Barnes & Noble College Booksellers Inc. for $596 million. Despite the name, the two entities have been separate since the mid-1980s, back when B&N was a growing private company (it went public without College Booksellers in 1993). The reunification of the two is considered a move by B&N to get into digital textbooks.

McDonald's Corp. has been consistently recession proof, and the trend continued through most of the summer. In July, the giant restauranteur posted same-store sales gains of 4.3 percent compared with the same month last year. U.S. restaurants open for a year bagged a 2.6 percent sales increase, while European stores saw a whopping 7.2 percent same-store sales increase.