My path to writing The Great Recession Blog began as a personal journey. Prior to the start of this so-called “Great Recession,” my ex-wife had a family home that was an inheritance from her mother. I worked as a property manger at the time, and near the end of 2007, I could tell from rumblings in the industry that the U.S. housing market was on the verge of catastrophic collapse. I urged her to press her brothers to sell the family home before prices dropped. The house went on the market and sold right away — and just three months before Bear-Stearns and others crashed, taking the U.S. housing market down for the tumble. Her family sold at the peak of the market. I decided in the months thereafter to write humorous editorials in a series I called “Downtime“, which chided the U.S. government and banking people who should have seen the economic collapse on the horizon but whose greed, cronyism, and ineptitude got us into this mess. I self-syndicated those articles to The Hudson Valley Business Journal, The Valley City Times-Record (North Dakota), The Daily Herald (Tennessee) and a news website in Israel (www.worthynews.com) and another in Australia (australia.to). From writing those op-eds for newpapers, I went on to create The Great Recession Blog. The predictions I made proved right on schedule. (Well, let’s say they ran tighter to schedule than Amtrak anyway.) I told my friend we could expect further economic collapse mid-to-late summer of 2011. The market soon went into a freefall that lasted most of August.