No one could have seen it coming?

An anniversary article in the Bulletin about the Great Recession, basically saying that no one could have seen it coming.

By the time they are talking about, circa late 2007, I'd been writing my bubble blog for almost a year. And I was probably late to the party-pooper party. It was pretty clear for years that we were in a housing bubble, especially in Bend.

Not that anyone in the real estate business was listening--except Brooks Resources. They seemed to react very quickly and effectively. But there were plenty of people shouting out warnings.

Not your chicken little types either. For instance, I've not seen what I consider to be a bubble in the stock market or housing market or the economy as a whole since. (Except for bitcoin.) Overvalued is not the same thing as a bubble.

I prepared for the crash, eliminating all debt, making sure I wasn't committed for future product, and cutting expenses--and came through it pretty well. (As well as anyone can do when sales drop by half over a three year period. Heh.)

See, by that time, I'd seen at least five major crashes in the stuff I sell; where stuff that nobody had heard of the day before became something that everyone wanted now and by the time I got a full stock in no one wanted anymore.  Sports cards, comics, beanie babies, pogs, and Pokemon, to mention a few.

Housing showed all the the same signs. The arc is usually the same if you're watching for it. The first crash put me in debt for a decade, the second crash added a few years to that debt, and the third fad we made good money at, and the fourth we made better money at, and the fifth was lucrative too.

And crashes are a good way to get healthy, in a sense. You get down to priorities, figure out what really matters, and what you really want to do. As long as you budget correctly, small drops can be very profitable, and big drops don't have to be destructive.

Most people get that one big bubble in their lifetime and they learn from that. Then, of course, it never happens again. Heh.

I was lucky in a way that I'd been through several bubbles before, even if they were for things like pogs, because I'd already learned my lesson.

But I still feel the need to call out the fallacy that no one saw the Great Recession coming. There were dozens of us talking about it in Bend alone on blogs. But when you're in a bubble, it's hard to see outside of it until it's too late.