Fred Harrison is Research Director of the London-based Land Research Trust. Harrison not only predicted the Global Financial Crisis, he was among the first to do so more than a decade in advance. Bezemer and others cite his 2005 book Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, but in 1997 Harrison (with the late Frederic J. Jones) published The Chaos Makers where he predicted frenzied activity in the land market with prices peaking by 2007, which would be the primary cause of and "presage the global depression."
Harrison's 2010 The Inquest
2. Which narrative presented by Douglas Elliott and Martin Baily of the Brookings Institute in Telling the Narrative of the Financial Crisis: Not Just a Housing Bubble best represents the causes of the Financial Crisis?
Everyone was at fault: Wall Street, the government, and our wider society.
3. The Global Financial Crisis is ongoing and will end in the year
2013 or beyond.
4. What were the primary causes of the Global Financial Crisis?
All sections of society conspire to reinforce a financial system that fosters public and private indebtedness. Credit is a collateral consequence of an irresponsible public revenue system than penalizes work and saving and rewards investments in land-based assets.
5. What still should change as a result of the crisis?
Re-structure the pricing mechanisms to eliminate the deadweight losses caused by taxation. This permits government to reduce income taxes, making it possible to re-employ marginal workers, re-launch capital formation and build confidence in sustainable growth.
Compiled by Gary Karz, CFA
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