Posted on 01/18/2012 10:10:10 AM PST by blam
Europe Is Setting The Stage For The Mother Of All Black Swans
Simon Black, Sovereign Man
Jan. 18, 2012, 12:39 PM
[Editor's note: Simon's friend Tim Price is a delightfully witty fund manager in the UK, one of the few free-thinking individuals in all of institutional finance. His recent thoughts below on the euro debacle, gold, and hyperinflation are some of the best ever written on the topics.]
“Under the circumstances, discussions with Greece and the official sector are paused for reflection on the benefits of a voluntary approach.” Debt talks “have not produced a constructive response.” - The Institute of International Finance, January 13, 2012
“The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage..” - Japanese Emperor Hirohito after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, announcing Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
There is a terrible hubris at the heart of mankind. Like every other living thing on the planet we are products of nature, but we consider ourselves to be well above it. We are beset by regular reminders of our vulnerability, but quickly dismiss them off-handedly to a spiritual plane, calling them “acts of God” as if to show that we could never have prevented them.
In a significant essay for Foreign Affairs, “The Black Swan of Cairo,” Nassim Taleb shows how the efforts of our authorities to suppress volatility actually end up making the world less predictable and more dangerous.
“Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policy makers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to “Black Swans” – that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Cute play on words, but If we see it coming, it's not a Black Swan, by definition.
Cute play on words, but If we see it coming, it's not a Black Swan, by definition.
What if we see it coming, but act like we don’t? I think it could qualify that way.
You are right. Taleb, the originator of the phrase, wrote the article; he should know.
Failure to acknowlege seeing it, out of incompetence, arrogance, or more sinister reasons, seems to qualify.
The failure to see it qualifies, if it prevents the only persons or institutions which could actually do something to prevent it, from seeing it.
The ordinary citizen of the world doesn't qualify.
I prevented a Black Swan event by posting this article.
(ahem, I didn't prevent the event. I just prevented it being called a Black Swan event.)
This reminds me. I still need to get at least one pistol.
Black Swan article which mentions “Turkry Problem”.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck you have a Duck Problem:)
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