Economist Fred Harrison, known for accurately forecasting the 2008 financial crisis and previous downturns using his 18-year property cycle theory, says converging crises will create chaos.
An 81-year-old veteran, who had a 10-year stint in forming the Russian economic policy after the fall of the USSR, sees the situation as something he’s “never experienced in my lifetime.”
“We’re talking about a pattern that’s been going on for hundreds of years, with deviations only if there’s a world war,” he said in a recent YouTube interview.
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Delaying the Inevitable
The COVID-19 pandemic, he believes, disrupted this cycle by bringing forward a surge in house prices that otherwise would have peaked in 2025–26. Instead, the gains were “banked” during lockdowns, pushing the world closer to the end of the cycle today.
According to Harrison, governments are now inflating housing markets, burdening workers with taxes, and deregulating lending risks, actions that only accelerate the approach of collapse.
“We are locked into a peak behavior which will result in the termination of house prices over the next 12 to 18 months,” …