Have you seen this video? Entitled Peter Schiff Was Right, 2006-2007, it is an amazing, nine-minute compilation that features Mr. Schiff, the president of Euro-Pacific Capital, suffering the slings and arrows of various market gurus like Arthur Laffer, as he bravely predicts — again and again and again — in various television appearances that the housing bubble is going to lead to economic disaster. One thing that makes it amazing is how unflinching Mr. Schiff is, how unyielding, how matter-of-fact, no matter how scornful and sneering the response from the other talking heads. Even when they laugh at him, he keeps coming back. The other thing that makes it amazing, of course, is that Mr. Schiff absolutely nailed the current crisis — and did so many, many months before the rest of us could feel the first tremor.
The video has become one of those “viral” events that take place on the Internet as it’s passed around from one e-mail address to the next. In fact, I first saw it when one of my brothers sent it to me — a brother who had never before evinced the slightest interest in CNBC or financial gurus. “This video is unbelievable,” he wrote me.
You hear people asking: why didn’t anyone warn us of the coming calamity? The answer is that there were plenty of smart analysts, and journalists, who did warn, loudly and often. But when you are living in a bubble, there is a deep desire to tune out dissenting voices, or to scorn them, as Mr. Laffer does to Mr. Schiff. The herd mentality is a powerful thing. I remember during the Internet bubble when my friend, Herb Greenberg, was writing devastating article after devastating article, poking holes in companies’ financial statements. Instead of being thanked by readers, he was flamed. They didn’t want to hear it.
The same is true of another prescient journalist: my former Fortune colleague, Shawn Tully. I recently asked Fortune’s managing editor, Andrew Serwer, to send me a list of Shawn’s stories warning about the housing bubble. He sent back seven stories, two of which the magazine put on the cover. The last one was written in August, 2006. The first article was written — are you sitting down for this? — in December 2002. The cover of the magazine (left) pretty much hit people over the head with the idea that housing prices couldn’t last.
And here is the money quote:
Put simply, U.S. housing prices are stretching the outer limits of what’s reasonable and sustainable. Instead of cooling down, prices keep hurtling upward, defying the laws of economic gravity just as grievously as those unmentionable dot-coms once did.
In other words, what looks like a gift to homeowners today is potentially a recipe for disaster later on: If the boom persists, housing will become so overheated it’ll pull the entire economy into dangerous, fragile territory. In a year or two, prices will fall with a thud, unleashing a double-dip recession that will pummel home prices even more. “Every day prices rise, the risk gets greater that a bubble will form — and unwind in an ugly way,” says Mark Zandi, an economist with consulting firm Economy.com.
True, Mr. Tully was wrong in saying the prices would fall “in a year or two.” Instead, it took five years. But his overall analysis was right, and prescient, and like Mr. Schiff, he never flinched, even as the market continued to defy gravity. Something to think about the next time you’re wondering why “nobody” saw it coming.
