There's an old saying: Academic economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five major recessions.<p>That is: One possible answer to the question in the title is: "Because actually the available information didn't make it clear what would happen and when; you thought it did, but actually you just got lucky."<p>Whether that's actually the case here is of course difficult to tell. On the one hand, hindsight bias (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias</a>) makes it likely that it won't <i>feel</i> like it is, even if it is. On the other hand, uh, it does indeed feel like the crisis was pretty predictable. (But I bet that most people who are now saying "well, that was hardly surprising" failed, just as FWIW I failed, to short the market heavily or anything. Not-being-surprised is cheap.)
<i>"Everybody missed it. Academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators."</i> - Alan Greenspan<p>That is complete bullshit. Try telling that to Paulson, who made billions on the crash. I saw the signs myself, but did not understand them, not believing that people like Greenspan would allow something so stupid to take place. When studies show that Americans trust their government less than ever, mark me down as a statistic.<p>When a bank official told me that "jobless, bankrupt, illegal immigrant, it doesn't matter," they can get somone a home loan, I should have known what that meant, and so should the Fed.<p>Greenspan should just shut up and accept his legacy.
The problem is: Greenspan may very well be right in his assessment that Burry may just have been 'a supremely lucky flipper of coins'. There are thousands of people in similar positions making predictions about all kinds of phenomena. Whatever the outcome, there are always a number of predictions that are 'uncannily' close to that outcome. Unfortunately, these 'correct' predictions are only seldomly made by the same people. If someone truly had better insight, you would expect them to make the right predictions more often. However, if history teaches anything, it is that I can safely predict that Burry will never again make such an accurate prediction and that it will never be clear whether he was a prophet or a lucky bastard.
"Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.<p>As a nation, we cannot afford to live with Mr. Greenspan’s way of thinking. The truth is, he should have seen what was coming and offered a sober, apolitical warning. Everyone would have listened; when he talked about the economy, the world hung on every single word."<p>Instead of expecting Greenspan to see exactly what Burry saw, wouldn't it be better if we didn't have a single point of failure? In the absence of Wall Street's reliance on the Fed, Burry's insurance plays could have further pushed up prices and signaled to everyone else that something was wrong.
For anyone interested in learning more about Michael Burry, I wrote a post using material from an old message board he used to run:<p><a href="http://streetcapitalist.com/2010/03/24/learning-from-michael-burry/" rel="nofollow">http://streetcapitalist.com/2010/03/24/learning-from-michael...</a><p>It is pretty amazing to see how far he has come since then, from a young doctor posting about investing on the internet to going head to head with Greenspan.
Most people could have predicted it and many people did. This includes not only people like Mike Burry, George Soros and others that made money out of the whole mess, but also those bastards in Goldman Sachs who after touting and selling housing debt derivatives for the entire bubble ended up being short on housing just when the bubble burst.<p>Multiple people in academia predicted the crash. Nouriel Roubini (spelling is wrong) Peter Schif, every economist that ever posted on Counterpunch, etc.<p>And also of course most ordinary people predicted it. If you look at the housing forums on the Internet from about 3 to 4 years ago you will see that most people were sure there would be a crash and only people that were already deeply invested in real estate were trying to think of ever more creative ways to deny it.<p>So Greenspan's statements speak more about him than the actual reality. He and the Bush government just surrounded themselves with economists from one very narrow school of thought and did not listen to anyone else. It is not that people did not predict the recession, it is that Greenspan would not listen to anyone who predicted it, therefore nobody that he bothered to listen to predicted it.
The Fed DID see what was happening. They saw M3 soaring.<p>So they did the logical thing. They discontinued publishing the M3 statistic in 2006.<p>Yep, they decided we just need to bury our heads in the sand and the developing crisis would just go away.<p>But did it?<p><a href="http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-charts" rel="nofollow">http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-chart...</a>
There will always be a distribution of opinions and therefore people with "foresight".<p>The real challenge is to design a system with more stability.<p>My opinion is that while we have had many putative capitalists in charge of regulating markets, we have very little understanding of what it takes for markets to function well. One thing missing from the debate is an interest in reducing informational asymmetries. If I have two bags of apples one paper and one see-through plastic, you are going to buy the plastic bag (environmental issues aside).<p>Our financial markets don't work very well, because financial accounting is the opaque paper bag.
Give it 10 years, and when the LHC spawns a dimensional rift connecting us to Xen, I guarantee at least one man will come forward and say, "I can't believe nobody else saw it coming". He will be treated like a prophet, when in reality he was just a lucky alarmist.<p>Either that, or he will be me- a lucky satirist.
I think this is actually an argument for more accessible markets. Retail investing was not offering vehicles to the average investor who wanted to invest believing that house prices would fall. I wondered to many professional and non-professional investors how t invest against the housing market to no avail. If people had understood how to "bet" against house prices then I am confident the bubble would have deflated more gently and earlier. The easiest retail position to take is a "long" purchase of an investment instrument. What is needed is the knowledge of and retail accessibility to bubble-deflating investments.<p>How far should this go? Anyone should be able to own and even construct derivatives. Such a market would bring along a host of educational material and means to understand the provenance of your derivatives and the counter-party risk. Obviously this accessibility and transparency would benefit professional derivative investors as the pool of clients, information, transparency, and alternative parties and views with which to trade expands.<p>But this is impossible as long as the notion of "qualified investor" exists. If Greenspan and traditional economics has any hope of being correct then what is needed is to enlarge the pool of "qualified investors" to simply everyone. We need not more regulation but less but for the requirement that the prospectus be accurate, intelligible, and anyone that sells "investments" must do business with anyone has the purchase price.<p>Taleb says market-based black swans are becoming more common. The question is: are they common enough to make a profitable business out of suppressing them?
The only time Greenspan could have meaningfully intervened was back in 2002 or earlier, and even then intervention would have caused enough pain to have the media deem it a "crisis" in itself.<p>Notably he did speak up about Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s but was silenced by the GOP's drive to make war -- nobody wanted the economy cooled at all when gas prices were already creeping up.<p>So what's the man to do now? He could admit all that about the war and cast serious doubt on the Fed's independence and the US financial system, or he could insist that the boom/bust was a complete and total mystery.<p>In his last book he goes to great pains to marvel at seemingly impossible "risk adjusted rates of return" throughout a variety of markets, but concludes that in the case of housing it's still "froth" and not a bubble. Since the bubble hadn't become obvious at the time of the book's publication, what else would he say?<p>But more practically, we should all realize that if housing prices had dipped about 1-2% less than they did, most of the damage would not have occurred. Our institutions (banks, etc.) were calibrated to handle some amount of systemic risk, but not as much as it turned out they should have.<p>Hindsight is 20/20 and Burry may have been extra prescient, but like any bettor he could have been wrong. Since he had no additional information than the rest of the market, we can conclude that the rest were all sheep (or idiots) or that there was actually some <i>-- gasp --</i> chance going on.<p>The difference is that the majority of people, institutions, etc., misjudged just how much calamity would be caused by price deviations that they calculated to be highly improbable.
Check out "Peter Schiff was right" video:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw</a><p>Now, talk about "nobody could have predicted this" (c) Obama
If this article piqued your interest, please PLEASE read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, in which he tells the entire, fascinating story of Michael Burry, the one-eyed genius with Asburger's who fought against the entire Wall Street establishment.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393072231" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393072231</a>
It was pretty obvious, I think. And I will remark that the NY Times at least once wrote up the people doing interest-only mortgages as bold financial innovators.
I saw it coming too. (But I only put my money in a shorting mutual fund. Didn't have the great vision, this guy did. Still, I avoided the losses most experienced.)<p>If I could see it, anyone could have. I'm not particularly smart or well-connected.
I started seriously worrying about the crash back in 2004 [1], and while I was wrong about a lot of details (not least, ahem, the result of the 2004 US presidential election), I was bang-on about the underlying problem. What eventually surprised me was just how long the bubble was able to continue inflating before it finally popped.<p>[1] <a href="http://www3.sympatico.ca/taylormcgreal/thecomingcrash.html" rel="nofollow">http://www3.sympatico.ca/taylormcgreal/thecomingcrash.html</a>
The relationship between Wall Street and Washington blurred the lines too much. As a regulator, its tough to recognize a fundamental flaw in the investing practices of the firms that these people used to work for.<p>The "good old boy" network was reluctant to admit that they all screwed up.
Well, you don't see what you wouldn't want to see even if it's right in front of your face. And that works collectively in a society as well.<p>No matter how many people are yelling "soon, we're toast!", you won't hear it if you don't want to imagine such an outcome in the first place.<p>Boom.
A couple years back, I remember reading an article that argued that housing was way overpriced because the rents were only about half the value of the house. They should be in line with each other.
Audit the fed: <a href="http://www.auditthefed.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.auditthefed.com/</a><p>Whereas: Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Treasury have put the American taxpayer on the hook for over $12 trillion in bailouts and loans; and<p>Whereas: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently refused to tell Congress who has received trillions in these funds from the Federal Reserve; and<p>Whereas: Allowing the Fed to operate our nation's monetary system in almost complete secrecy leads to abuse, inflation, and a lower quality of life for every American
It is a fucking conspiracy. fed is run by the banks, banks didn't want fed to intervene bc they were making big bonuses and it was good for the people there. duh.<p>This is an obvious case of corruption of our government. No one was regulating because they <i>didn't want to regulate it</i>.<p>This is why there needs to be things like campaign finance reform and people should seriously go to jail without chance of being pardoned for these types of crimes.<p>Willful ignorance of this shit should have been considered aiding & abetting theft.<p>But no, no one will go to jail because the rich and powerful never go to jail. They didn't get rich and powerful by not being corrupt.