61–66 of 66 posts
Margaret Thatcher when asked what was her greatest political achivement - 'Tony Blair' she replied. Isn't Cameron just a more greasy version of the slimy Blair, Black Swan spotter or not?
This is ridiculous. The financial crisis was not a "black swan." Many people saw it coming and prepared accordingly. It was only groupthink and willful ignorance which kept most people from doing so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Taleb wants financial services to come in two flavors: boring, predictable, public banking utiliies; and no-safety-net no-bailout risk-taking investment." But how do you get there? How do you make sure they don't spin out of control or even how do you decide which firms to break up and how? (I don't disagree, I am genuinely interested in learning how he sees it can be implemented and without new significant regulati…
One way to make banks boring and predictable would be to define precisely what kind of products they are allowed to sell. This sounds like what Taleb would want, but it don't think it would be good to entirely eliminate innovation. But if regulators would forbid any product valued by models they don't understand, it would probably be a good start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe he intends to keep rehashing it until people understand . Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.
Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated. Absolutely not. Ideas that are diffuse and unoriginal, on the other hand, are often repeated because they are uncompelling. I've read The Black Swan , and although it was entertaining, I didn't feel like I learned anything of value.
Bastiat articulated the Broken Window Fallacy in 1850, and here we are 159 years later shredding perfectly good cars to 'create jobs.' It certainly seems like some good ideas can't be repeated often enough.
Before one gets hysterical, consider debt as a function of GDP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
Yeah, but the problem is that the rest of the world is not currently blown to smithereens and in need of American labor and capital to rebuild it the way it was in 1945 (not to mention deeply indebted to the United States as well). The trough of that graph is about the point where Western Europe and Japan managed to rebuild their economies to the point where they could actually compete effectively. The United States…