Financial meltdown, while painful, can be good for your career. Look at Minsky, the new economist du jour, who commentators the world over are fighting over to claim as their own.

Now the subprime debacle seems to be creating another celebrity in the form of Alphaville favourite Christopher Wood.

The WSJ has picked up on Mr Wood’s colourful commentary in his Greed & Fear newsletter, in which he tipped the collapse in US mortgage-backed securities back in 2005.

He warned that US mortgage debt was “where the credit risk lies in the American and global financial system.”

Mr Wood, who spends most of his time strategising for Hong Kong brokerage CLSA, has called financial frothiness before, says the WSJ. He urged investors to sell just as Nasdaq was about to peak in 2000, and sounded the alarm on Thailand before the 1997 devaluation of its currency helped spark the Asian crisis.

His take, they add, on the current situation is not encouraging:

In the credit world I think we’ve been in a bubble every bit as big as the one in technology in 2000 and in Japan in the 1980s,” he says. The chief culprit, Mr. Wood believes, is securitization, which he thinks “has been basically running amok” in the US in recent years. Securitization in the housing market, he says, has led investors to ignore legitimate financial risk by pretending that it is too spread-out to matter.

We’d expect nothing else.

This entry was posted by Helen Thomas on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 7:53 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with christopher wood. Edit this entry.