Saturday, February 21, 2009

Props to the Economist

In an interview for the weekend edition Nouriel Roubini deflected a question about whether he was the great seer of the bubble bursting by producing a list of fellow-travelling skeptics

  • Robert Shiller of Yale and the Case-Shiller Index
  • Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley
  • Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard
  • Nassim Taleb
All true, they've been at it for a while, though Taleb largely seemed more concerned with promulgating his grand theory than with goings on in the real world.  I think, however, we should remember the Economist in this relation.  Every six months or so there'd be an article about the global housing bubble where it would tell us that the US, the UK, and especially Ireland and Spain, were fucked.  It couldn't correctly project how everything would malfunction, I think only Roubini himself started getting close to what has come to pass in his 2006-7 vintage predictions, which were like:  "we will all burn in the fires of hell."  But the Economist did a pretty good job of covering the crisis as it took shape.

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