Peter Schiff
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2009–2013
1:12:41 · 610K views · Sep 25, 2009
Peter Schiff's November 2006 speech to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Conference, in which he warned an audience of mortgage bankers that the housing bubble would collapse. The clip runs about 73 minutes.
HN cites it as a famous example of someone publicly predicting the housing crash before it happened.
3 comments from Hacker News
The best whistle blowing before the bubble popped had to be Peter Schiff telling a huge crowd of mortgage bankers they were about to lose their jobs in Nov 2006: this video
I recommend Peter Schiff for investing ideas, here's a famous video, he's got some bestselling books too. this video
Interesting comment. If I am to understand it correctly, and follow it to its logical conclusion: 1. Economists have no tools for studying the topics that they're supposed to study, such as asset prices. 2. They are unable to make predictions because doing so would be "speculative." 3. Because we can't know what is going to happen until it happens, we might as well do away with professional economists because they can provide no input of practical (read: forward-looking) use. They can only try to explain why what happened happened. As for the requirement that one have "special, insider information" to have predicted the housing bubble, this is simply not true. There were a number of people from a variety of professions who recognized the housing bubble. One, Robert Shiller, to answer my own question, is an economist who also predicted the .com collapse[1]. There were also politicians[2] and market participants who predicted a collapse. Some of the latter, like John Paulson, who made billions betting against subprime, didn't publicly promote their beliefs, but others, like Peter Schiff[3], did. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video