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Ben Jones & Patrick: Psychics or Super-Geniuses?


               
2007 Mar 6, 9:13am   20,920 views  179 comments

by HARM   follow (0)  

Patrick's alter ego? Ben Jones - mathematical genius?

As the rolling bubble crash gathers steam, and even formerly hostile MSM sources now reluctantly admit the bubble --and its bursting-- is undeniably real, one question remains: how did people like Patrick Killelea and Ben Jones correctly predict all this so accurately beforehand?

Nearly two years ago, Ben and Patrick founded their now-famous blogs, dedicated to the national housing bubble. They boldly predicted its demise as "inevitable" long, long before most industry experts would even admit the bubble even existed. Now events are unfolding almost like clockwork, almost exactly as predicted:

  • Exhaustion and unaffordability leads first to falling sales & rising inventories, but very sticky prices (at first).
  • Inability to continue flipping and/or serially refinancing forces flippers and over-leveraged FBs to try to exit, spiking inventories and gradually un-sticking prices in successive waves of option-ARM resets.
  • Failure to indefinitely to hide default/foreclosure/repurchase losses off the balance sheets forces many sub-prime operators and MSB issuers out of business, drying up liquidity.
  • The MEW-ATM shutdown spills over into the general economy and either triggers a general recession, or at the very least, localized recessions in extreme-bubble regions.
  • The crash slowly grinds away over years, eroding homedebtor equity via a combination of inflation and nominal price drops, until the price-rent/price-income equilibrium is finally restored.
  • Finally, the rolling crash becomes obvious even to the most clueless FB and the cheerleading MSM. Newsweek issues it's "Housing: Worst Investment Ever!" cover story, close to the exact market bottom.
  • My questions: how could such seemingly average Joes ever predict such events when the brightest, most highly paid industry experts could not? I mean, David Lereah went from "no bubble" to "correction's over" in like 30 seconds flat! If the danger signs were so obvious, then why didn't we hear about them beforehand from the NAR... the Fed... Wall Street? It's not as if these frequently quoted (and rarely challenged) "industry experts" could possibly have known about this mess beforehand, but just kept it to themselves for some reason. Like, that's just conspiratorial, tinfoil-hat wing-nuttery, right?

    So, if the only way to perceive an asset/credit bubble is after-the-fact (as Sir Alan Greenspan has asserted), then how could Ben and Patrick possibly have known about it that far back? Are they psychic? Are these guys prescient modern-day Nostradamus-es? Or, are they financial super-wizards --real-life Hari Seldons-- who can accurately predict the future with mathematical precision, but posing as regular guys? If the housing bubble was so impossible to predict, even with access to the very best market data and cutting-edge computing power (as the experts insist it was), then how could two ordinary working-class stiffs manage to pull off such a feat by themselves?

    Should we be concerned that Patrick and Ben are some form of genetically mutated super-geniuses hiding in plain sight?? How else could they possibly have foreseen the unforeseeable?

    Spooky, isn't it? :roll:

    Discuss, enjoy...
    HARM

    #housing

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    1   Michael Holliday   @   2007 Mar 6, 9:24am  

    Well, when all is said and done, you can't fool the middle class.

    And you can't fool the "market."

    Patrick and Ben evince the genius of common sense wedded to superior intellect, minus a hidden agenda.

    Nice work, gentlemen.

    2   astrid   @   2007 Mar 6, 9:32am  

    So long as we don't have to deal with encyclopedists...

    3   HARM   @   2007 Mar 6, 9:36am  

    Hey, and if the whole Hari Seldon angle doesn't put you on edge, imagine what could happen if a "Housing Mule" shows up! Imagine someone with the power to mentally manipulate real estate prices all over the galaxy at will.

    Think about it... 8O

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