CNN:

Shiller is a professor at Yale University. He is joined by Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, who both teach at the University of Chicago.

The award was for their work on the pricing of financial assets. Together they concluded that predicting the price of stocks and bonds in the short term is virtually impossible. But they showed it is possible to forecast the broad course of prices over longer periods, such as the three to five years.

hiller was among those who warned in the 1990s that the run-up in stock prices as part of the Internet stock bubble was the result of "irrational exuberance."

Last decade, Shiller made similar warnings about the run-up in U.S. home prices. That proved to be correct when the housing bubble burst and plunged the nation into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

He helped to develop the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, which is one of the most closely watched measures of home values.

Fama and Hansen are not as well known as Shiller outside the field of economics.

Starting in the 1960s, Fama helped to demonstrate that new information is quickly incorporated into stock prices, a fact that makes short-term price predictions difficult.

Hansen developed a statistical method that was well suited to testing theories of asset pricing, the committee said.

None of this, by the way, is economics. The actual profession of managing, organizing, distributing social wealth does not find its end in determining the prices of homes, stocks, and assets for the sole purpose of beating the market. As for Fama, the man behind the ridiculous efficient market hypothesis (market prices tell us the truth about what's really going on), he is not only not an economist, he is not much of a financial adviser (which is what we tend to call economists today):

I met Eugene Fama in his office at the Booth School of Business. I began by pointing out that the efficient markets hypothesis, which he promulgated in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, had come in for a lot of criticism since the financial crisis began in 1987, and I asked Fama how he thought the theory, which says prices of financial assets accurately reflect all of the available information about economic fundamentals, had fared.

Eugene Fama: I think it did quite well in this episode. Stock prices typically decline prior to and in a state of recession. This was a particularly severe recession. Prices started to decline in advance of when people recognized that it was a recession and then continued to decline. There was nothing unusual about that. That was exactly what you would expect if markets were efficient.

Many people would argue that, in this case, the inefficiency was primarily in the credit markets, not the stock market—that there was a credit bubble that inflated and ultimately burst.

I don’t even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don’t think they have any meaning.

Yes, the man who just won a whole "Nobel" prize for economics doesn't have an idea of what an asset bubble is. Why? Because it doesn't fit into his perfect picture of an efficient market, a market that represents real values—if, that is, the government does not distort them with subsides and tariffs. But what all of this shows us is that these men (and they are almost all men) replaced economics, which is democratic, with a view of economics from the point of those who have lots of money and want to make more of it.

I composed this post here, which I leave today, and which is outside of Bologna...