Professor Robert Shiller warns Britain may suffer a double recession

One of the world's most influential economists warns today that Britain faces the prospect of two recessions in quick succession.
Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University, said that the recent stock market bounce should be treated with caution.
The apparent upturn could soon go into reverse, he told The Times, marking a repeat of economic patterns in the 1930s and the 1980s. Such a double-dip slowdown has been nicknamed by economists a “W-shaped” recession, where recovery is so fragile, the country could be plunged into another slowdown as soon as it emerged from the last.
Speaking to The Times this week, Professor Shiller said: “I was last here [in London] in the fall and there is definitely a sense of optimism now. The Fed [US central bank] and the Bank of England seem to have things under control. Everything seems to be getting better.”
However, he warned that “there is a real possiblity of another recession. We may well see more bad news. It is a real failure of the imagination to think otherwise.”
He said that there were a number of issues that threatened any long-term recovery for the British economy - rising unemployment, mortgage defaults, and another wave of new company failures that “could surprise us yet”.
Professor Shiller also said that the banks were still harbouring large portfolios of troubled assets.
“We all want to lick this problem — there's been a burst of confidence over the last few months, but really it's not based on any news. A lot of people think this recession is coming to an end. But I'm not so sure. A resurgence in confidence may not translate into new jobs. We are still in uncertain times.”
He added: “In 1931 in the US, President Hoover unveiled his recovery plan - there was a huge stock market rally — the market improved but it didn't hold because bad news kept coming in. Increased confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy but it doesn't always hold.”
Professor Shiller said, however, that he believed another likely scenario to be one where Britain would face a continuous decline with house prices falling for a number of years, drawing comparisons with the decade of misery in Japan in the 1990s.
The economist became well known when he predicted the timing of the end of the dot-com boom in March 2000, and was one of the first to warn that the US housing market was perilously overvalued and that its collapse would cause devastating reverberations across the world's biggest economy.

SHILLER HAS BEEN RIGHT BEFORE
Robert Shiller predicted that the internet bubble would burst in March 2000. Weeks before the boom ended, when the Dow Jones industrial average was about 11,000 points, he published Irrational Exuberance. He argued that market valuations were unsustainable, likening the phenomenon to a Ponzi scheme on steroids. As the bubble burst, Wall Street stocks dropped 20 per cent in 16 months.
The phrase “irrational exuberance” to describe the fevered stock market was adopted by Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Professor Shiller was also among the first to warn about the US housing boom, telling investors that high property prices could not last. He said that the impact of the housing crisis could be so great that it might bring down a key financial institution. Within weeks, Lehman Brothers had gone bust, while mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the world’s largest insurer AIG had to be bailed out with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/article6346115.ece