clock — watching time, the only true currency

Jim Fallows reminds us that The Atlantic’s efforts to be timeless rather than timely often result in scarily accurate predictions.

I wish 2005’s Countdown to a Meltdown were less accurate.

Just one of the many points, written as a memo to the incoming president of 2016:

For politicians every aspect of this cycle was a problem: the job losses, the gasoline lines, the bankruptcies, the hard-luck stories of lifetime savings vanishing as the stock market headed down. But nothing matched the nightmare of foreclosures. For years regulators and financiers had worried about the “over-leveraging” of the American housing market. As housing prices soared in coastal cities, people behaved the way they had during the stock-market run-up of the 1920s: they paid higher and higher prices; they covered more and more of the purchase price with debt; more and more of that debt was on “floating rate” terms—and everything was fine as long as prices stayed high and interest rates stayed low.

Read the whole thing. And remember it was written 3 years ago.

Note: It’s good to aim for “timeless” when Monthly used to be in your publication’s name, the print edition is now only 10x/year and you’re still publishing in 2008, where Twitter/IM/RSS/email mean nothing important stays unknown if you’re online for an hour!