Way back on November 30 of last year, I wrote a blog entitled The Panic of 2008? in which I said:

This is NOT the Great Depression II. Nor is this the stagflationary 1970s. It is going to unfold as some other Beast. Only the broad outlines of this Beast appear discernable now: it will likely feature (1) increasing import prices; (2) wage stagnation (that does not keep up with price inflation); (3) real asset deflation; and (4) possibly a Japan-style "liquidity trap."

Well, it appears that the official name of what we are living through will indeed be "The Panic of 2008." No less an authority than the National Bureau of Economic Research, which officially dates recessions and recoveries, published a paper last month entitled, Market Responses to the Panic of 2008 the abstract of which begins, "We model the panic of 2008 as part of the wealth and substitution effects deriving from a housing price crash that began in 2006."

So yours truly engaged in a little vanity and decided to do a google search and find out if I was indeed the first person to categorize our crisis as "The Panic of 2008." Close, but no cigar. As it turns out, "I'm number 2!" by a grand total of 11 days.

The honor goes to Gerald Celente, who gave an interview with New York's Hudson Valley Business Journal on November 19, 2007 in which he said:

A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.
"We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen," Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a "Panic of 2008."
....
"The bigger they are, the harder they'll fall," he said in an interview

Celente -- who forecast the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the dollar's decline a year ago and gold's current rise in May -- told the newspaper the subprime mortgage meltdown was just the first "small, high-risk segment of the market" to collapse.
....
Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) and General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM), will also be fairly common "for some time to come," he said. He said he would not "be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths," Celente said.

"The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living"

Celente of course does this sort of thing for a presumably handsome living. Yours truly is just a voice in the wilderness who does it for intellectual gratification. Number 2 by 11 days? I'll take it!