As Thornberg said, you can recognize a bubble, but you cannot accurately predict how long it will go on. His analogy is, “Don’t ask me what that crazy man is going to do. If I knew, he wouldn’t be crazy”.
Other economists have said you can recognize an asset bubble, but you cannot predict its collapse.
What Talbott did is make the points for why there is an asset bubble, and how it will deflate. Those points are still valid today, and he made them at a time when everyone thought RE would only go up. He was the visionary.
His timing was off a bit, as was Thornberg. The UCLA group predicted the bubble would end in 2003. I will write more about the UCLA group in the next day.