Don't Trust Those "In Charge"

If you read nothing else this week, read the article from Forbes excerpted below. I remember being told  in Miami in late 2004, by a PR guy who did work for real estate developers, that a huge "real estate bubble" was developing that would burst and cause "a lot of banks to fail." He expected it to happen in 2005--a little early--but he was proven right. On the other hand, those "in charge" never saw it coming.

Don't Trust The Wise Men Of Finance - Forbes: " . . . Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a George Washington University class last week ( I saw it on C-Span) that the 2008 financial crisis took place because “nobody was looking at the whole system.” Almost simultaneously former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was telling another GWU group, televised on C-Span, that “no one saw the Long Tail coming,” meaning that no Wall Street leader, no economist, no legislative committee, no regulator, could predict the perfect storm of all investment assets collapsing at the same time. I beg to differ. Here, from a piece I wrote on June 18, 2007 — more than a year before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, I was talking to a whole mess of well-connected people about what danger we might be in. . . . "

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