Every recession model ignores the one variable my 2008 audit flagged

I tracked housing resale patterns through Clark County records for 14 months before the crash and the ratio of cash buyers to loan applicants flipped 3 weeks earlier, so why does every forecast still lean on interest rates instead of that leading indicator, and has anyone else built a comparable dataset from county clerk files?

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rileygarcia29d ago

Wait, did you just casually build a better crystal ball than Wall Street with public county records and a spreadsheet? That's honestly hilarious because I once tried to track foreclosure patterns in my own county back in 2010 and gave up after two weeks when I realized I'd just been color coding a mess of PDFs for 14 hours straight. So hats off to you for actually pulling it off, because that kind of data grind makes my brain itch just thinking about it. The cash to loan flip is super interesting though, like people vote with their wallets way before the banks admit anything. Maybe the models miss it because it's not a sexy headline number, just a boring old ratio that takes actual digging to find.

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