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The Nobel committee praised Shiller's work in forecasting asset prices.
Among his many accomplishments, Shiller predicted that the U.S. housing market was in a bubble during a time when everyone thought prices had nowhere to go but up.
And many are pointing to David Leonhardt's prescient August 2005 New York Times article titled "Be Warned: Mr. Bubble's Worried Again."
In speeches, in television and radio interviews and in a second edition of his prophetic 2000 book, "Irrational Exuberance," he is arguing that the housing craze is another bubble destined to end badly, just as every other real-estate boom on record has.
...He predicts that prices could fall 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the next generation and that the end of the bubble will probably cause a recession at some point.
..."This is the biggest boom we've ever had," said Mr. Shiller, who bought into the boom himself in 2002, with a vacation home near one of Connecticut's Thimble Islands. "So a very plausible scenario is that home-price increases continue for a couple more years, and then we might have a recession and they continue down into negative territory and languish for a decade.
"It doesn't even attract that much attention," he continued. "There will be many people thinking it was a soft landing even though prices may have gone down in real terms by 40 percent."
The then "largely unknown Yale economist" nailed it.
Here's a chart of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index showing that home prices peaked not long after this quote.
S&P/Case-Shiller