If you are a bear, you must accept that you will always be wrong in polite society, and you will continue to be wrong all the way down to the bottom of recession. That is the cross that bears must bear.
Over the last three months we have seen a rolling collapse of speculative debt and real estate across half the global economy, yet friends still come over to my desk at the Telegraph, with that maddening look of commiseration on their faces, and jab: “so when is the sky going to fall then, eh”?
Well, excuse me. The sky has fallen. The median price of new homes in the US has crashed from a peak of $262,6000 in March to $238,000 inSeptember. This is a 9pc drop nationwide.