Monday, August 18, 2008

The Winter of the Perma-bear

Excellent profile in the NYT mag of the one guy who predicted how bad this recession would be.

“Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”

(Nouriel Roubini. Here's his blog, I have to start reading it.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Remind us when that happened?

Anonymous said...

What we have here is...failure to communicate. See, some men you just cant reach.