There’s just no second-guessing the cold hard uncertainty of life is there?
From Wikipedia: “The financial crisis of 2007 to the present was triggered by a liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system … The collapse of the housing bubble, which peaked in the U.S. in 2006, caused the values of securitities tied to real estate pricing to plummet thereafter, damaging financial institutions globally."
I seem to remember that last year it was only “the financial crisis of 2007 - 2009.”
These economists! Just grasping through the mist for any substantial thing, can somebody, anybody, explain to me intelligibly whether Paul McCulley was advocating, mocking or merely predicting when he said “"There is room for the Fed to create a bubble in housing prices, if necessary, to sustain American hedonism”?
And Paul Krugman, NYT in 2002?
One economist who truly did have the wit to see what to many of us non “masters-of-the-universe” was horrifyingly obvious, namely that what goes up must come down, and that perpetual growth is as impossible as perpetual motion, was Ann Pettifor:
“There were some unkind comments on my column of August 29 2006. In it, I argued that last summer's fall in house sales in Florida and California were canaries in the deep vast coal mine of US credit; that the impact of a credit/debt crisis in the US would have a much greater impact on us all, than the crisis in Lebanon ..."
"The scale of the crisis is beginning to be grasped. However, deniers are still at work, spreading disinformation, delusions and, in some cases, downright lies about the real state of the international financial system. "
But if I may venture to disagree with Pettifor, it seems to me that the full scale of the crisis has NOT been grasped.
There is no going back to business as usual. You can try, but it won't work.
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