PhillyDeals: PhillyDeals: Local forecaster saw the coming crisis

Joel Naroff

, forecaster-for-hire and part-time chief economist for

TD Bank

in Cherry Hill, was "the top forecaster of the U.S. economy in a period that included the start of the global credit crisis," says Bloomberg News, besting 125 rivals, including Wall Street's finest.

Naroff used S&P/Case-Shiller Index home-sale data - plus lots of visits to building sites and loan offices - to show over the last three years that home prices were collapsing and to predict what that would mean for the economy.

Maybe his previous employer should have listened. Naroff was the top Philadelphia

economist for

Wachovia Bank

predecessors

First Fidelity

and

First Union

, but the company let him go as it cut 8,000 employees after it became Philadelphia's largest bank via merger in the late 1990s.

Wachovia and its shareholders rank among the victims of the ensuing housing-market bubble. Wachovia acquired tens of billions of dollars in overpriced home loans in its 2005 acquisition of

Golden West Financial Corp.

, turning the bank into a massive tax deduction for purchaser

Wells Fargo & Co.

But warnings only matter if you listen. Wachovia chief economist

John Silvia

also predicted the housing bubble, even before then-Wachovia chief executive officer

Ken Thompson

closed the Golden West deal.

Former Fed Chairman

Alan Greenspan

, testifying in Congress yesterday, made his most direct admission yet that he misunderstood free markets and the people who ran them all those years.

"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity - myself especially - are in a state of shocked disbelief. . . . To the most sophisticated investors in the world, [U.S. subprime mortgages] were wrongly viewed as a steal. . . . It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that precipitated the crisis."

The crisis, Greenspan added, "has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined. . . . I cannot see how we can avoid a significant rise in layoffs and unemployment." Banks now need the support that only governments can give, says the former free marketeer.

Also testifying was former Treasury Secretary

John Snow

, who blamed both Republicans in Congress and President Clinton for pushing home loans to risky borrowers. He points out that "the regulatory system had contributed to the lack of transparency because of a bewildering array of federal and state authorities, with no one regulator having a full view."

Left unsaid was that lobbyists for financial-services firms had supported that unwieldy regulatory system for generations, hoping to avoid the concentration of government power that Snow now advocates. His recommended changes, collected in a report last spring, are under consideration by his successor,

Henry M. Paulson Jr.

, as Wall Street burns.

Developer

Brian O'Neill

says he has landed

Turner Investment Partners Inc.

as the first tenant in a 180,000-square-foot "financial center" within

Uptown Worthington

, his 2-million-square-foot, mixed-use development at the old National Rolling Mills site near Malvern.

Turner, which counted more than $20 billion in assets before the late stock market fall, will move from nearby Berwyn sometime after Worthington opens next year.

High above Center City Philadelphia - actually, not so high - the

DirecTV

blimp, in town for the World Series, looked for a while yesterday afternoon as if it was buzzing competitor

Comcast's

headquarters, the highest building in town.

"DirecTV is being totally in-your-face," said investment banker

Eric Meltzer

, an onlooker taking pictures of the low-flying dirigible.

The blimp looped across

its competitor's hometown, from the stadium district to North Philadelphia via Center City, crossing the skyscraper district each way, as part of a World Series promotion, DirecTV told my colleague Bob Fernandez.

"We're just letting people know about DirecTV," said

Josh Stern

, DirecTV's director of national ads and sponsorships in New York. The blimp has a 70-by-30-foot screen on its skin promoting the company.

Comcast had no comment.