Barkley Rosser

How good are the bubble forecasters, and can these phenomenon be usefully measured quantitatively? My impression from Mandelbrot's book was not perfectly yet. I've seen housing market analysis from people like Didier Sornette, who would imply we should have experienced a crash in the UK before now, although there may be special factors here since his analysis like large-scale immigration that have contributed to a soft landing. Are you thinking of the more intuitive, but post-rationalising behaviour of a Soros, or the very calculating activities of a Taleb, but who himself seems to value intuition? How large is the population of rational traders? My guess is not that large, and they too must be quite vulnerable to failure and exit from the market, because of the loss aversion of their employers, as Taleb describes.