"the stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions” (Samuelson)"the stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions” (Samuelson)

Plenty of people claim to having "predicted" the GFC, often in very broad outlines and years and years before. If you consistently make extreme, deviant forecasts you'll be wrong 10, 20, 50 years in a row... and then that one time you happen to be sort of right, you'll run with it like you're a genius (in our bitcoin-gold world, Peter Schiff comes to mind...)

This schmuck, Richard Bookstaber (great name!), some author and economist I've never heard of, is out in the NYT bragging about his 2007 accomplishments (his book "Predicting" the crash was published in January 2007):

At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, I was at a hedge fund. By its end, I was at the U.S. Treasury. At both, I worked with people only a few years out of college. The drama of 2008 was all they knew about financial markets. “Remember what’s happening,” I told them. “You’ll never see anything like this again.”

"Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they’ll see worse.""Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they’ll see worse."

We have returned to a period of risk, one rife with the sort of pressures that have led to major financial crises. This time, the risks are spread across industries, markets and nations: artificial intelligence, the roughly $2 trillion private credit industry, stock markets, Taiwan and now Iran.

Private credit is crap #1437101, a hidden bulk of investments waiting to blow up (and harm the balance sheet of somebody, somewhere)

these loans rarely exchange hands, leaving investors uncertain about what these instruments are really worth or how easily they could be sold if conditions deteriorate.

yet people are withdrawing funds:

because the market has no organized exchange and information is inaccessible, investor withdrawals can trigger the kind of wholesale run that in the past turned financial stresses into full-blown crises.

What appear to be separate developments — a new kind of lending market and technological dislocation on one hand, stock market exuberance on the other — are in fact the same network of money and expectations, approached from different directions.
the A.I. boom is placing new strains on the physical infrastructure it depends on. It drives enormous electricity consumption and has a ravenous appetite for advanced semiconductors. These carry geopolitical weight.

Yeah, I don't like this guy. And it feels very fad-y, very chasing-the-latest (AI, Iran/Taiwan, big tech, private credit). At least the high-level summary is decent:

Our current financial system fails not because any one thing goes wrong. It fails because different shocks propagate through the same structure and in ways that are hard to anticipate. When something eventually goes wrong, it spreads faster than it can be contained.
This is not the first time we have built a system like this. The crisis of 2008 is often remembered as a story of homeowners gorging on excessive debt, a housing bubble fueled by speculation and millions of mortgages going bad. But the housing bubble itself was not the reason the crunch became so destructive. The accelerant that pushed the crisis to such depths was the financial system that had been constructed around the housing market. Novel and complex financial instruments obscured the risk, intertwined balance sheets across the financial system and eliminated the buffers that once absorbed shocks.

archive: https://archive.md/deUpv