Economists who are supposed to be "so smart" don't even listen to their own predictions!

Has the world gone mad? Are the monkeys in charge? Boomer Bows Out in Shakeout That Led to Vermont Beard (Update1) April 27 (Bloomberg) -- In early 2008, David Roberts’s morning routine at the Ridgewood, New Jersey, train station was as unchanged as the view from its platform, which overlooks a downtown anchored by the Daily Treat diner and a 77-year-old movie theater. Roberts would sip coffee,... [more]

Has the world gone mad? Are the monkeys in charge? Boomer Bows Out in Shakeout That Led to Vermont Beard (Update1) April 27 (Bloomberg) -- In early 2008, David Roberts’s morning routine at the Ridgewood, New Jersey, train station was as unchanged as the view from its platform, which overlooks a downtown anchored by the Daily Treat diner and a 77-year-old movie theater. Roberts would sip coffee, eat a corn muffin, scan the Financial Times and step aboard the 7:50 train. This was not the same trip he had made for the 14 years he worked for three Wall Street firms. This was a commute to nowhere. Roberts, 61, was bound for an outplacement center on New York’s East 37th Street, where he pursued job leads and the dream of starting a consulting firm with former colleagues. Like many of his neighbors in Ridgewood, Roberts had been thrown out of work after the credit markets seized up last year, joining thousands of commuters in the competition for jobs that don’t exist anymore. Roberts, an economist at Dominion Bond Rating Service until January 2008, was fired 13 months after he predicted in a published report the recession that would end his livelihood. “You can see a train wreck coming,” Roberts says. “But that doesn’t mean you can get out of the way.” Roberts has suffered through a chain of unanswered job applications, an ill-fated relocation to Washington, and depression. As of April, he had lost or spent more than half of his $1.4 million in savings. One of the few risks he takes with money these days is at the poker table. They’ve lined up a rental house in South Newfane, Vermont, for $1,800 a month, roughly half their current mortgage payment. Next, Roberts must figure out how to stop the money drain, which has reduced his nest egg by half to $720,000. More than 70 percent of the money disappeared in the market crash, he says, lamenting that he didn’t act on his own prediction that a recession was coming. “As an economist, I have no excuse whatsoever,” he says. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a0nJKlCkI47U&refer=home [less]