“John Talbott’s predictions have been spot on.” — Newsweek Magazine
“Talbott is an oracle with a track record: His previous books predicted the collapse of both the housing bubble and the tech-stock binge before it.” –Bloomberg News
“Talbott is one of only six forecasters in the country that got things right. In 2006, he called the peak in home prices, and then in the beginning of 2012 the trough.” –Wall Street Journal
“You need not embrace John’s political bombast, but you ignore his financial prescriptions at your peril. For over a decade, he has made consistently prescient observations about future developments that were ignored by the vast majority of establishment analysts and pundits…until they happened. John is a brilliant unconventional thinker. His concept of measuring investment returns in terms of ounces of gold instead of units of paper currency could revolutionize investment practice much as Einstein’s general relativity revolutionized cosmology.”–Peter Fahey, Retired Partner, Goldman Sachs
“Finance is based on trust. But what do you do if you cannot trust financiers? Talbott, who has long been an acute observer of what’s wrong with our financial system, proposes provocative answers.” –Daron Acemoglu, the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024
“You stress that criminal acts must have been committed by lenders and commercial banks prior to the global financial crisis and I am sure this is right. We will eventually see a great deal of deception of consumers, investors, regulators and everybody else. You point out specifically that economists have not done a good job in explaining the crisis, and I would agree with that.” – Simon Johnson, the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024
“John Talbott blows a deafening whistle of financial corruption and government malfeasance. His grave warnings about Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue come with strong advice about how to protect ourselves from the next terrible economic storm — Uncle Sam’s going broke.” –Laurence Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics, Boston University
“Brutally honest, and genuine, Talbott identifies the key problem our society and economic system face; corporations, especially banks, have way too much political power and cannot be trusted with investors’ money as governments, regulators, and even academics betray their responsibilities to the public. Talbott calls it like he sees it.” –Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
“John provides a shrewd discussion of money and politics—and the deleterious effect the latter has on the former –-Publishers Weekly
“I only wish I had discovered John years earlier – it would have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars I lost in the stock market crash. Better late than never – I am following his advice now and sleep very well at night, feeling confident that I am no longer trusting my investments and financial future to so-called investment advisers on Wall Street.” –Larry S.
“In a world full of shysters and liars it is so refreshing to see that all is not lost, there is still integrity even in this present financial darkness through John’s insights.” –Elizabeth R.
John is a best-selling author whose nine books on economics and finance predicted the dot.com collapse, the housing crash and the entire global financial crisis. The Coming Crash in the Housing Market published in 2003 was the first book to warn about the impending housing crash. In 2006, with perfect timing, he published, Sell Now! The End of the Housing Bubble as the housing market began its collapse in early 2007. He went on to write Contagion: The Financial Epidemic That is Sweeping the Global Economy that predicted that the subprime mortgage problems of the US would mutate and infect all markets worldwide, especially in Europe. His book, Survival Investing, foretold recent history of a world in which governments could not be trusted to tell the truth to their citizens nor commercial banks to their depositors and investors. He was also an associate professor of finance and economics at the fifth highest-ranked business school in Asia teaching in Dubai, Singapore, Sydney and Hyderabad, India for seven years in the 2010s consistently being voted teacher of the year by his students.
Previously, John was an investment banker for Goldman Sachs where he specialized in corporate finance, M&A and leveraged buyouts. At Goldman, he structured, financed and closed four of the ten largest transactions in the history of the firm. He was the youngest member of both the firm’s Strategic Planning Committee and its New Products Committee. John has acted as a financial advisor to some twenty Fortune 500 companies and numerous countries including Norway, Russia, Qatar and Jordan.
John’s seventy plus articles on economics and finance have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, The Huffington Post and salon.com and he has appeared on television as a finance expert on CNBC, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, Fox Business News and CSPAN and with Dylan Rattigan, Joe Scarborough, Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo and Larry Kudlow.
He was named a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business and has written and published peer-reviewed academic research articles on economic growth and democracy, emerging economies, inequality and AIDS prevention. John is a structural engineer from Cornell University and holds an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School where he graduated in the top 2% of his class.
In 1999, Talbott warned that the hi-tech sector may crash because advertising dollars alone were not sufficient to support so many free internet companies.
In 2003, Talbott warned his audience about a coming housing crash that would crush the banking system and lead to a global economic crisis.
In 2006, Talbott called the absolute fifty year peak in home prices and advised people to sell vacation homes, investment properties and if possible, to rent rather than own their primary residence.
In 2006, Talbott predicted the country would see a decline in national home prices of approximately 33% and cities in Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada would see declines of as much as 60% which incredibly turned out to be exactly right.
In 2006, Talbott told his readers that could not easily sell their primary residence to utilize a real estate hedge by shorting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock which each then declined in value from over $65 a share to under $1 a share in just twelve months.
In December 2007, Talbott told his audience to sell their common stock holdings as the Dow then collapsed from 14,000 to 6,500. He warned that the entire US banking system was heading rapidly toward insolvency.
In 2008, Talbott advised to buy gold at $650 which quickly nearly tripled in price and in 2026 has reached $5,000 an ounce.
In 2008, Talbott was the first to warn that municipal tax-free bonds would face increased bankruptcy risk as the coming economic slowdown would deplete cities’ cash reserves.
In 2008, Talbott argued that the subprime mortgage crisis of the US would mutate and infect markets and economies worldwide, especially the banks and countries of Europe.
In late 2008, Talbott warned that Ireland, the UK and Spain would see dramatic declines in the prices of their housing stock.
In 2009, Talbott predicted that the lobbying strength of the big Wall Street banks in Washington would prevent any meaningful reform of their corrupt business practices with investors.
In 2010, Talbott warned that solvency problems in Greece would not be contained and would spread to Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal and even the UK, France and Germany would face serious debt problems.
In July 2011, Talbott warned that Facebook’s true inherent value is some 78% lower than its IPO price. Facebook subsequently trades off almost 60% in price.
In December 2011, Talbott reversed his long held bearish views on housing and recommends investing in residential real estate. It turned out that December 2011 was the absolute bottom for US home prices nationally and cities like Phoenix, Atlanta and Sacramento have seen 60% to 80% increases in price since then.
In 2012, Talbott explained that the stock market was not trading at an all-time high, but rather, once historical and expected future inflation were taken into account, was trading at a historical low making selected stock investments advisable. The stock market has appreciated 600% since then.
In March 2020, Talbott concluded that COVID was being transmitted airborne nearly a year before the CDC and the WHO came to the same conclusion.
In 2020, Talbott concluded that COVID’s origins were from an accidental release from a Chinese lab that eventually admitted they were working on making viruses in the wild more easily jump to humans but never admitted they also were making the virus more contagious in humans.
In late 2020, Talbott developed a model of COVID’s future spread that predicted which states were most at risk, and which were not, based on state mortality and vaccination rates which turned out to be 100% accurate.
In early December 2025 Talbott alone predicted that Trump’s threats to Venezuela had nothing to do with fentanyl or regime change but rather was all about their oil, the largest proven reserves in the world.
“We shall see that the real culprits causing our recessions, depressions, inflationary spirals, real wage declines, major business collapses, unemployment and growth stagnation are not our hard-working people, but rather, a very powerful combination of our largest corporations, our commercial banks, and our governmental institutions that are more interested in responding to the lobbying of big money special-interests than in providing to the needs of their people.” – Originally written in 1999.
“Only if banks are allowed to fail by our government will their shareholders implement safeguards necessary to see that their lending programs are disciplined.” – Originally written in 1999.
“I would also put a physical limit on the maximum size that our commercial banks and our largest corporations could grow to. These companies must be of a size that allows for fair competition, and more importantly, lets the worst performing companies seek bankruptcy and orderly liquidation without an overly burdensome cost to the society.” – Originally written in 1999.
“Market theory predicts that the current high home prices are a good predictor of future home price performance and we know that real markets are less susceptible to bubbles and crashes because of efficient pricing and that because some participants are irrational does not make the entire market pricing system irrational or inefficient. But I hold the opposite view. I believe that current home prices are artificially high and due for a major correction downward. And I don’t think the reason is because the market participants are irrational. As a matter of fact, I believe that the homeowners and lenders and guarantors are doing exactly what you or I would do in a similar situation — namely, they are each acting very rationally. So how can I conclude that the market is overvalued? The answer is that the housing market in the United States is not a true “market” at all.” – Originally written in 2003.
“Homeowners have grown accustomed to a world of aggressive mortgage brokers, realtors and bankers. It is hard to imagine a future world in which ‘For Sale” signs stand on lawns for years rather than days, where instead of multiple offers above the asking price, you are faced with taking numerous discounts to your asking price, where you need to serve lunch at your open house just to get the brokers to come over and look, and where banks have retrenched with new lending policies that include asking questions like what did this property sell for 10 years ago. If bankers retrench, and we assure you that is what they do for a living (just ask any farmer in the Midwest), then all the formulas you know for lending and pricing go out the window. There will be no comparables in the neighborhood because nothing will be selling. Bankers will have to go back to very realistic valuations, probably based on square footage and historical pricing. Valuations will further be damaged by the banks’ own activity as they dump foreclosed properties on the market at huge discounts to the mortgage amount. Banks really do not want to hold bad loans on their books because it only reminds them of managerial errors of the past. They are infamous for buying high and selling low when it comes to foreclosures. Unfortunately, their aggressive selling will only exacerbate an already weak property market.” – Originally written in 2003.
“As usual, it will be the unsuspecting public that will be left holding the bag when all this gets sorted out. The taxpayer will have to honor Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt commitments. The taxpayer will absorb the cost of cleaning up the real estate and mortgage industry. The public will absorb the trillions of dollars of cost of bailing out the commercial banks that get in trouble with their mortgage portfolios. And the public will suffer layoffs and wage hits as they weather the recession or depression that will result when these major housing-related industries plummet, taking the entire economy with them. And during all this pain, the public will wrestle with losing their homes to foreclosure when many will find their mortgage balances far exceed their homes’ depressed true market values.” – Originally written in 2006.
“Another argument made by the naysayers and those still in denial as to whether there will be a recession is that everything is temporary, that these are not permanent losses but only cyclical losses. Nothing could be further from the truth. These losses from the bank’s perspective are indeed permanent. These mortgages are not going to spring back to full value. Housing prices that have declined are not going to re-inflate. The reason is that the bubble is bursting and is deflating a boom and returning to more normal pricing. The banks in the future are not going to lend 11 times your household income to buy a house. They might lend three to five times your income if you have a good job with demonstrable income, if you have a good credit score, if you are willing to put down a substantial down payment and if you have some verifiable means of demonstrating your job and income. This is a return to normalcy. Bank’s losses are not going to be reversed. They are permanent. The effect on the general economy is permanent.” – Originally written in 2008.
“European countries are facing a double whammy. Housing price declines in many European countries are just beginning. As England, Ireland and Spain experience eventual housing price declines of 25% to 35%, their banks will realize significantly greater losses, their financial system and financial institutions will increasingly become more insolvent and their remaining banks will pull back on lending. This will push these countries into even deeper recessions. I would not be surprised to see Europe’s GDP contract by as much as 10% or more over the next four to five years in real terms.” – Originally written in 2008.
“The COVID virus is definitely being transmitted airborne“. – Originally written in March 2020 one full year before the CDC and the WHO announced it.
” Maybe no alien civilizations survived the adolescence of the introduction of high technology – namely, nuclear weapons, modified genetics, AI, autonomous weapons systems, etc. This would explain Carl Sagan’s conundrum that there are a trillion times trillions of stars in the sky and yet we have not detected any radio waves travelling at the speed of light from any other civilization. If they are there, they should be receiving our earliest radio transmissions – Hitler’s speeches and the Amos and Andy radio show.” – Originally written in January 2026.
1- Slave Wages: How the Rich and Powerful Play the Game-1999
2- The Coming Crash in the Housing Market-2003
3- Where America Went Wrong and How to Regain Her Democratic Ideals-2004
4- Sell Now! The End of the Housing Bubble-2006
5- Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics-2008
6- Contagion: The Financial Epidemic That Is Sweeping the Global Economy-2008
7- The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street-2009
8- How I Predicted the Global Economic Crisis: The Most Amazing Book You’ll Never Read-2011
9- Survival Investing: How to Prosper Amid Thieving Bankers and Corrupt Politicians-June 2012
10- Why Diets Fail: Because You Are Addicted to Sugar- December 2013