It’s weird that major natural disasters appear to accompany financial collapses. They’re sometimes held to have caused the financial recession. They don’t. It’s us.

I had “Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A case study of the economic costs of real estate bubbles 1972 to 2006” published in early 2007 because I believed the 2008 Australian property collapse might stand “as a proxy for economies of the world”. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 proved to be the biggest collapse since the 1929 depression.

In the same year, the United Nations reported that cyclones, earthquakes and hurricanes around the world made 2008 one of the worst years of the decade. These included the deathly Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar.

In late 2018, I used the same barometer of the economy to forecast economic recession in 2020, of course without knowing that COVID-19 was about to hit the world.

As China wrestles with an initial decline in its land markets, I’m led to wonder what if any natural disaster is going to accompany the bursting of the world land price bubble some time in 2026/27.