From someone involved in real estate, real estate finance, stocks, venture capital, financial modeling, and behavioral finance (since before that phrase was eve

From someone involved in real estate, real estate finance, stocks, venture capital, financial modeling, and behavioral finance (since before that phrase was even coined), who sold his home and three other properties from 2004 to summer 2008 and rented so as to exit before the crash, all these bubbles and crashes are, IHMO, not about modeling, they are about greed, fear, conflict between self interest on collective interest, and perverse incentive and compensation systems (in many areas, from politics to lobbying to regulatory to finance to sales to brokerage to legal to money management to many (all?) of the other important things for finance-related models). None of those things have changed materially. Nate can build the fanciest financial asset/credit/price model from his wettest dream and it will fail, probably at the worst possible time, such as once you go all in on it. Many reasons for that. But I bet he could get a job on Wall Street pumping out models that back up what will make the firm the most amount of money in the short term, damed the best interests of pretty much anyone, the firm included, in the long term. See Goldman Sachs :)