Place your bets

The economic "good times" couldn't last forever, or at least that seems to be the consensus over at Calculated Risk. In the span of a few short weeks, we've gone from arguing whether it's going to be a hard landing or a soft landing, to arguing how hard the landing is going to be, to arguing over when the end is going to come.

Here are the picks so far:
Oct 2005 BE
Nov 2005 David Yaseen, Fernando Margueirat
Jan 2006 Yusef Asabiyah, dryfly, Frank, redfish
Feb 2006 Mish
Mar 2006 Colin H, ChasHeath, Alan Greenspend, Movie Guy
Jun 2006 DOR
Aug 2006 Jason Wright
Jul 2008 jl
Nov 2008 Elaine Supkis
March, 2011 Paul
NEVER Larry Kudlow's doppelganger

As for the Battlepanda Pick? April 2006. Just because I can't see things going on like this for much more than a year. And Alan G will be retiring Jan 2006. I'm not his greatest fan, but doubtless he has a stabilizing effect on the market.

Bonus prediction: Housing will go down first, thus sapping consumer confidence. That in turn will cause corporate profits to plunge, spelling the death-knell for our shaky recovery. Is this going to be 'the big one' though? I don't know. I suspect not.

I have a feeling Prof. DeLong is not going to get drawn into this mug's game. He's content to tell us that the long run will probably catch up with us "like a thief in the night." Comforting.

When will that day come? Tomorrow? Next month? Next year? On January 21, 2009? A decade from now?

We macroeconomists who believe in financial market equilibrium have, today, a certain similarity to Millenniarists: our models of when The Day will dawn are not much better than the models of those who base theirs on a rule that transforms HILLLARY RODHAM CLINTONN into the number 666.