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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

I was there for the Great Recession, and they were indeed in the public discussion. I remember the year 2007, as a 20 year old anti-capitalist, I was counting days until the economic crash. As predicted by plenty of left-wing economists at the time.

The only people who didn’t see it coming were the capitalists who were invested in the inflated market, and had bought into pseudo-scientific economic theories that served the single purpose of affirming what the capitalists already believed.

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This is a bit of a "broken clock is right eventually" sort of thing, though. I could say without any evidentiary basis "there will be a financial crisis" for years and eventually be right, but I don't think it would be fair to say that I predicted it in a meaningful way. The details matter.

I don‘t think so. These predictions were explicit, and were tailored around the economic situations at the time. As you sibling mentions, even some capitalists made the same predictions (or they believed the left-wing economists) and were able to profit off of this.

Yeah me too, now I invest in dividend stocks.

I stay away from stocks, and instead focus on trying to get rid of capitalism.

I hope you've taken a good look at the alternatives, because historically they've been terrible. Unless you mean "not capitalism but still market economy", or "European market economy 'socialism'", although I don't see how those are much different.

I was too - and to be frank: it's dishonestly revisionist to say this was a topic in the public eye.

There's a very good reason a book (and movie) like The Big Short was such a big hit. It's because it was about the handful of people who actually saw the crash coming and were confident enough to put their money and reputation on the line.

The entire left wing of the political spectrum saw this coming (except social democrats; whom I don’t consider left wing). And if you were shorting stocks to make money of off this, you probably were not left wing. Additionally, left wing economists get plenty of ridicule from main stream capitalists no matter what they say, so there really is no reputation to either earn nor to keep.

> The entire left wing of the political spectrum saw this coming

Feel free to cite at least one reputable source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Portes

Appreciate the links but I think we can both agree that there is no evidence that will come close to supporting "the entire left wing of politics" predicted the mortgage crisis

I was obviously exaggerating (and even so, I excluded social democrats). My point is though it was widely known on the political left that the economic boom was about to come to an end.

Do they see coming the predictable failure-modes of left-wing economies, though? History seems to suggest not. Also, did "the entire left-wing" see specifically a debt crisis through bad assumptions of creditworthy mortgage securities coming, or they just saw "capitalism" as a failure and here is a specific case, aren't we so prescient. That's not a prediction.

Left wing economists saw the former. Left wing as a whole saw the latter.

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