The Aftershock Investor: A Crash Course in Staying Afloat in a Sinking Economy

Introduction

We wrote our first book, America’s Bubble Economy, back in 2004 and finished it in 2005, long before the housing bubble was visible to many people. We asked our publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to hold the book as long as they could because we were concerned that nobody would buy it. Few people believed there was a housing bubble at that time, much less a whole bubble economy. They wouldn’t hold it any longer than fall 2006, and so it was published.

With that book and Aftershock, we have built up a good track record of predicting much of what has happened since then, certainly better than most analysts. Almost no economists or analysts wrote an entire book about such issues at the time, although many have written books since. But many of those books are more historical than predictive. It’s still scary to predict the future. It’s much easier to review the past.

We have been criticized by some as being one-trick ponies—that we made one good prediction and that’s it. Certainly, there have been cases of this in the past, such as Elaine Garzarelli, the market analyst who famously predicted the 1987 stock market crash. But we’re not trying to predict a crash. What we are trying to do is predict a far larger change in the entire economy. Yes, an earlier real estate crash and stock market crash was part of that, but there is much more to what’s going on in the U.S. economy and world economy. Anyone who reads our books will see that.

Some people may say we were right about one ...