I suggest you look here and see that I was predicting the train wreck in December 2005.

People predicting some type of train wreck before it happened were a dime a dozen. My wife and I started shedding debt as a conscious strategy I think it was in 2007. We had some idea that we were in a housing bubble a few years before then with massive real estate debt (rental) -  We actually managed to more or less finish the process of shedding debt a few months after the crash started in the US.

A little bit before the crash the professional association that pretends that it represents all landlords in Ontario came out with a report on the rental business:

Property taxes were up, vacancy rates were up, rents were not keeping pace with inflation, and rental units were selling for record amounts.

The details of what was going down were not necessary to figure out something was going down and it wasn't pretty.

I was talking about the crash with my mother - and if I remember rightly Greenspan's comment that nobody could have predicted...

Could he really have been that stupid, or was he lying?

As far as criminal activity goes, the US is now fairly clearly a two tier justice system.

_{aspiring to genteel poverty}