[quote=ctr70]This was from Barons…Mark Hanson is a well known mortgage industry guru…
“Toss in unfavorable demographics, mounting energy costs, a miserable excuse for a mortgage market and inexorably declining home prices…well, you get the point. Housing is one of those festering sores on the economy that will be with us for quite a spell. And so long as it is, or until jobs grow more abundant and consumer income muscles up, the likelihood of a decent and sustained rebound for the industry seems a good piece off. And, we’re afraid, the economy’s recovery is apt to maintain its desultory pace.”[/quote]
After reading this, I was gratified to hear Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, being interviewed by Gwen Ifill on the PBS Newshour today.
Zandi apparently showed up to make his regularly scheduled quarterly prediction that the housing market would hit bottom later this year, and then start its recovery (he was also quoted on NPR newscasts all afternoon). For those who haven’t had the good fortune to follow Zandi, he’s been making this same prediction since 2006:
I have a very busy schedule, and a lot going on in my life, so it’s good to know that I can count on a reputable firm like Moody’s to keep a guy like Zandi on staff, and in the public eye, to ensure that I get accurate, up-to-date, expert advice on the latest in housing trends.
Seriously, it’s bad enough when the general public lionizes so-called “experts” who are anything but. But when leading policymakers and the most respected of journalists continue to use them as authoritative sources of information, I get really depressed. There’s simply no hope. I mean, how tough is it for journalists or the staffs of leading political office holders to do a little background research into these people? It’s not like the days where you had to go through miles of microfilm or pore through hundreds of pages of crumbling newsprint. The worst you have to do today is to winnow out the reputable stuff from the crap on the internet when you engage in information harvesting.
Don’t ANY of these people question why the name “Mark Zandi” keeps coming up as an “expert”, and yet the predictions he makes NEVER come true? If I was a journalist, I’d be mortified to find that I had presented opinions from this guy as expert, and that I had staked my reputation as a journalist on the “information” he was providing to my readers/listeners.
