Previous Episode: Melbourne Recovery

Here’s a quick quiz to see whether you’ve been paying attention lately.


Question one: How many times have predictions of things like property prices falling off a
cliff appeared in media headlines in the past, say, three years?


Question two: How many times have things actually gone ahead and fallen off the forecast
cliff?


Question three: Should we be listening any more to journalists and economists who predict
these dire cliff disasters?


So, how did you go with the quiz?


I don’t have the exact number of headlines which have forecast a mortgage cliff or a market
cliff or prices falling off a cliff, but it would number in the thousands so far in this decade of
the 2020s.


Now, as to how many times things have actually fallen off the alleged cliff, I do have a
precise answer: exactly zero times.


We were told property prices would fall off a cliff in 2020 but they rose.