“I have a confession to make. Twice while reading the book Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva, I felt a compelling need to refer to the first few pages and refresh my memory on when the book was published. For your information, it was published in the year 2007 (I believe in August) and well before the mega crisis and financial blowup of the second half 2008 unfolded. If not for anything else, then you have to read this book for its clairvoyance alone.The authors have been bang on target painting what was then a potentially scary scenario which ended up becoming one of the biggest blowups in the financial history of the world as it unfolded. They deserve credit for having faith in their contrarian doomsday vision when everyone else was going all out buying mortgage originator companies and expanding prop desks funded by banks’ leveraged books without any due regard for the inherent risks…..”
Comment:
It’s nice to be complimented about abilities…even if you don’t have them! And I can’t say that a little green man popped out of the corner to tell me to do it, either.
Clairvoyant? Who would want to be….since the essence of playing Cassandra is you’re doomed not to be believed at the time it counts.
What’s more, we weren’t the only ones who predicted a credit crisis and global financial collapse.
I found out recently that economics professor and author Ravi Batra also did – only so frequently that by the time it actually came around, he’d moved out of the spotlight. (His doomsday books are 15 years old).
Austrian-oriented libertarians have been warning about an impending train-wreck for years. Seems like it didn’t get through to the mainstream press – which, of course, had every reason not to want it to come through…
But ours is the most wide-ranging analysis and we were certainly the first ones to get a best-selling book out about it. [I should correct that – one of the first ones….I see that Peter Schiff’s Crash Proof and Michael Panzner’s Financial Armageddon were out in April that year. So was Bookhaber’s “industry insider” peek into hedge-fund risk management that I posted about earlier. But I didn’t get to read them and only skimmed Schiff’s and Bookhaber’s book after the publication of ours. And I still think ours was the most wide-ranging…and spookily timed – Mobs came out exactly as the first banks started collapsing.
And, even if I do accept credit only for doggedness, not prescience, it’s true that I’m mildly fey. I sometimes feel I was led to this project by a series of events that go back to 2001…. by strange coincidences, uncanny repetitions, chance encounters where the past and the future were entangled.
So, thanks for the thumbs up, Mr. Kabra – maybe I’ll pass it on to the green man.