8 who saw the crisis coming...

[Crewleader]

One year after the credit crunch began, Fortune looks back at who saw trouble ahead, and who just ended up in trouble.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0808/gallery.whosawitcoming.fortune/index.html?

[BrklynLiberal]

1. All eight qualify as Cassandras now that we all know the truth..

Much like all of those who criticized BushCo from day one....and were ignored.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. The thing about the Cassandra of Greek mythology:

She was a 100% ACCURATE prophet whom nobody believed.

The common use of "Cassandra," i.e. predicting disaster that never happens, is incorrect. Cassandra predicted disasters that DID happen. A better term for someone who gives false alarms is "boys who cry 'wolf'."

[bahrbearian]

2. Make that "9" I saw it coming too.

[elehhhhna]

3. 10 here.

[bahrbearian]

4. Maybe they should be counting the people who didn't see it coming.

[elehhhhna]

5. LOL. I know a few of them! Their willful ignorance was/is appalling!

[Warpy]

9. 11 here, plus I've noticed a few things they haven't

like the way debt has been substituted for adequate wages and how we're nearing a critical mass on that, where families can afford bare necessities but nothing more as they service all the debt they've taken on over the years.

[truedelphi]

16. Among other things that no one in the world of finance or economics concerns themselves

With is the notion of jobs.

I was just reading the definition of "supply side economics" and neither it nor its opposing economic theories worry about job creation.

Who needs jobs??

Well, we will find out the answer to that question the hard way over the next decade or so.

[samsingh]

6. these are people we should read regularly

[AwakeAtLast]

7. Then read about the 8 who didn't

and you'll be doing this ---> :banghead:

How many of them benefit from Uncle Bush's tax cuts, hmmmmm? :puke:

[crimsonblue]

8. I did I did...

I called it more than 24 months ago, when the first trickle of mortage defaults occurred. Add that to the ridiculous expansion in new home construction and ownership we saw from 2001-2005, the housing collapse was inevitable. The Government could have prevented this problem by buying up and securing the bad loans.. This would have cost us about $350 billion, but that is pittance to the massive bank failures we are seeing right now. God forbid the Government actually act preemptively on something other than War.

[AnneD]

10. I got out

2 years ago. I guess I'm a F#@*%ng genius.:sarcasm::eyes: I may have missed this pseudo rally, but I sleep well at night. Funny thing, I read several of those guys on a regular basis because I have always thought they were honest and told the truth. They weren't trying to sell me something.

[PassingFair]

11. NO ONE could have foreseen!

Oh, wait....EVERYBODY knew.

Some just wouldn't admit that the
piper would have to be paid at some
time.

[Yavin4]

12. I First Called It in 2002

When I realized that Greenspan was keeping rates artificially low to set up Bush's re-election.

[lxlxlxl]

13. Well...the only obvious thing is that CNN/Fortune are utterly clueless

It's pretty shameful that they would pretend to be a financial reporting institution at all. Subprime was a serious story/issue for maybe eight to ten months before CNN started blaming poor people for not paying their loans. How utterly fucking shameful.

It's become a fucking travesty to watch CNN/American TV media in general ignore a story until it gets too bad, and then make things worse by trying to analyze things in the poorest, shallowest, and most meaningless ways...This is not an isolated thing to finance, but just look at how they did the rises in oil price issue - blame the chinese and indians...war in georgia? blame russia.

the predictability is not cute anymore

[truedelphi]

15. It was important to blame the poor people

In our society, one does not blame the rich.

The lending was done without standards of any kind. For a while, anyone who wanted anything could have it. You just had to be either able to believe that the music of a great economy would always continue, and to really want what you were putting on the old credit side of your finances.

If there had been standards, there would not have been any housing bubble. So standards were deliberately lax to bring in all those who for whatever reason had poor credit, and should have been kept out.