I predicted the 2008 crisis in 2001. (Well an article on http://mises.org made it clear it would happen.) This was before the housing bubble started to inflate, and was easy to expect due to the changes in the CRA and the artificially low interest rates.

I profited from the bubble quite well, decided the top had been hit when things got really wonky and got out of the market in 2007. I was a year early, but I'm not complaining.

It's not a fallacy, you can do it, if you understand economics. The problem is, most people involved in stocks are more interested in technical analysis and tea reading than fundamentals of economics.

It's the fundamentals of economics that drive "black swan" events.

From 2001-2007 I constantly saw people claim there was no bubble, I constantly saw people say things like the economy is good and healthy. I constantly saw people pretend like the fed wasn't blowing up a balloon. Article after article was published spinning tales to pretend like up was down and down was up.

And then in 2008 when it popped, I constantly saw people claim there was no way to see it coming. I saw it blamed on Wall Street. And since then I've seen article after article published to misdirect and mislead about what was going on, saying up was down and down was up, to service the narrative.

The key indicator of a science is the ability to make predictions... yet the "dismal science" of economics is portrayed by politicians as incapable of saying anything, because they use it to pitch self serving narratives.

But the reality is, good economics has predicted every major crash, and its reasons. You can't necessarily know the timing-- I was off by a year, and I have no clue when the next one is coming.

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I see I've been slow banned and am getting brigade downvoted across all of my comments. This harassment is typical on hacker news when you think for yourself and don't tow the party line. Jesus, what draconian filter bubble. That's fine, my time here was largely wasted anyway.

Here's the comment I was going to make below, but now am not allowed to:

I've been slow banned so I expect a hell ban is coming, I don't know why, but I guess its because I'm not on the praising obama bandwagon. So this may be my last post, if I'm ever able to post it.

Yes, if I'd just stayed in with everything for 6 months or a year I would have been worse off. I was pretty close to the top, in what I was investing in. I did sense that the market got weird- the response was not what it should have been based on the macro events. When things stopped making sense, I got out...

If I hadn't gotten out at all I would have lost a lot of money - whether you measure to 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015.

Those investments were plays on the bubble... not investments that make sense after the bubble.

It's difficult to do long horizon investing when the market is so manipulated- by the government and by the messed up regulation-inhibited outdated exchanges.
But you can know the fundamentals.

The problem is, a lot of people emotionally don't want to face reality, and a lot more people get rich selling them fantasy.

No, the US economy is not doing well. Hell, the US government can't even sell bonds, it's selling them to itself with the Fed fabricating money to buy them.