[Symmetry]

If you could know a recession was inevitable some time soon from publicly available information then that recession wouldn't happen in the predicted time frame. Everybody would see it coming, take their money out of the market, and it would happen instantly.

[harshulpandav]

And with this mindset most people will not take any action until the big guys have taken an action. The timing could be the predicted time frame. But it is only too late by then and middle and lower class suffer. Top 1% controls around 40% of America's wealth.

[Symmetry]

Small players who try to time the market are going to lose out to the big players. You seriously should not try unless you feel like donating a portion of your retirement savings to Goldman and Sachs bonuses. Just invest not thinking you know the future and let the Jötunn try to outsmart each other.

[nine_k]

(Nit-picking: jötnar, since it's plural. But I like the image.)

[rv-de]

Many banks saw 2008 coming. Now the fundamental reason for this inevitable breakdown was also very lucrative at the same time. This meant every bank would try to stay in the game for as long as possible because quitting too soon would have them fall behind.

In the end you get this game where two or more cars are speeding towards an edge and who breaks first loses.

[zeroname]

That would assume everybody can interpret the information correctly and make an unemotional decision regarding their investments. In reality, everyone wants the party to go on indefinitely.

[Symmetry]

Stupid money certainly exists but it tends to systematically flow to smarter investors. This causes smarter investors to make up the majority of the money in the market. I don't want to suggest that the market is perfect. It can remain quite ignorant of important facts like "Sometimes housing market values become highly correlated" for quite a while. But once these facts become known it tends to respond very quickly.

[jt2190]

The author said as much himself:

> Yet, I wonder if it is possible to have a recession when so many people expect one. The worst recessions are the ones that people don’t see coming.

[Symmetry]

He said that, but he's still saying that there's a recession which is foreseeable by anyone, unavoidable, and hasn't happened yet. No recession has all three of those traits.

[mandelbrotwurst]

My hypothetical ability to predict the future does not mean that you're able to do the same.

[Symmetry]

Occasionally people do discover ways to predict future market behavior in ways others cannot. If they keep it secret than can make huge amounts of money. If they blab about it in articles it stops working. Well, mostly. There's are a couple of regularities that are published but exploiting them takes investment time frames of most of a century for returns not that much more than market average and nobody is willing to do that.

[ploika]

That's not what happened ten years ago in many different countries.

[Symmetry]

Some people were predicting the Great Recession ahead of time but not any more than are typically predicting a recession soon.