Nassim Taleb / Universa Investments

[winston]

Hehe, that's how Taleb's portfolio looks like. He seems to be doing well for now

His portfolio is doing well because it has been a bear market for the past 1.5 years.

It would be interesting to see what his portfolio was during the bull markets.

[b0rderc0llie]

His portfolio will only do well if unexpected events happen, no matter bull or bear market. He can play both sides. Eg. he can bet that dow will reach 20,000 or the dow will reach 5,000. And if something unexpected like that were to happen, he will gain. If not, he will just lose small amounts of money.

[iam802]

A Conversation With Nassim Nicholas Taleb

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 81_pf.html

Interview
Sunday, March 15, 2009; B02


Options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb made his name and career anticipating the powerful historic events he calls "Black Swans,"which include World War I, the rise of the Internet and the stock market crash of 1987. In two books published in 2001 and 2007, he urges readers to concentrate more on what they don't know than on what they do.

More recently, Taleb has blasted bankers and economists who issued reassuring forecasts right up to the brink of the current global financial crisis. He spoke recently with Washington Post reporter Peter Whoriskey. Excerpts:


You're a fierce critic of the entire field of economics. Don't economists know anything?

You have close to a million people out there in economic life. How many people saw the extent of what could happen in this financial crisis? Some people said we'd have a problem of too much leverage, but very few saw the potential total impact that could come out of it. They didn't see the cascading effects that can be produced by a complex system.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right. I wanted to find out the reason. They would say their models are not perfect. But data show that you do much worse using their models than you would without them. It's a bull [expletive] science.


Can you give a specific example?

Every time I saw [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke [on television], I would have a fit of rage. He claimed that we were in a period of "great moderation." He did not understand that Black Swans are preceded by low volatility and the buildup of hidden risks. He mistook absence of volatility for the absence of risk. It was like someone sitting on dynamite and saying "It's okay, we're safe because nothing has happened."


(802: as of this recent rally, VIX has gone down a bit. Is this a sign of 'volatility absence' ?)

In a complex system, things that are fragile should be allowed to fail very fast. [Former Fed Chairman Alan] Greenspan and Bernanke let something fragile, like the banks, survive very long. The longer it takes to break, the worse the outcome.

That's why I think Obama needs to start with a new economic team -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers were among those who didn't see this coming in the first place. He needs new people who understand complex systems.

What about economist Nouriel Roubini? Wasn't he calling attention to the potential danger?

Yes, Roubini got it right. But Roubini wasn't right because he's an academic economist. He was right because he is a very insightful fellow. He is so good he managed to surmount his education in economics.

Other than you, who would be the right choice for the Obama administration?

I know who should not be on his team -- anyone who did not understand that the world financial system included more risks than it showed. This leaves plenty of individuals outside the administration and outside the economics profession who warned about it. Aside from Roubini, the closest thing in the economics profession would be Ken Rogoff. I would also require that the person be a business person -- someone who did not make a career writing papers to impress fellow economists.

So what's your prescription for the economy?

The first thing we need to do is to get rid of the vicious bonus system at banks that encourages you to take these huge hidden risks. When it all blows up, they still have their bonuses, because the Black Swans happen only every so often. You see a lot of people walking around who are massively wealthy who never made a penny for their investors.

Look at [former Treasury secretary Robert] Rubin at Citigroup. He made and kept a $115 million bonus while the taxpayer has to bail them out. We should not be paying the Bob Rubins anymore. We have to have clawback provisions to make sure that we punish people for their bad bets.

I am in favor of partially nationalizing the banks for this reason and banning complex derivatives. Nobody understands them. I would also start indicting the vendors of these financial risk management systems that everyone relied upon to tell them everything was okay when it wasn't.

How do you define a Black Swan? If they're so unexpected, how can we prepare for them?

A Black Swan is an exception, like the bird. It is an event with massive consequences that is unexpected. My idea is not simply to say that these things happen. My idea has been to identify the vulnerabilities, the spots where people are driving the school bus blindfolded. In banking, I identified a huge amount of risk taking on the part of banks that were using bogus models to estimate their risks.

It was so painful to watch the banking system become so fragile to the Black Swans. Now there is wealth turning into air as we speak.

What do you see ahead? What do you make of the mainstream economists who predict that the economy will turn around later this year or next?

Look, globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China. So for a while it created the illusion of stability, but it has created this devastating Black Swan.

Complex systems do not like debt. So it will proceed to destroy tens of trillions in debt until society rebuilds itself in an ultraconservative manner. We are in for a worse ride than people think.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

Is this crisis going to last 17 years?

Unfortunately no, complex systems cascade much faster than that. However, the destruction will be deeper than people anticipate. It will bring down a lot of people.

My rosy scenario is that a better economic environment will develop, a low-debt, robust growth world, in which whatever is fragile will be allowed to break early and not late.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

[iam802]

Mr. Taleb Goes to Washington

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/jud ... ?page=full

Mr. Taleb Goes to Washington
By marion.maneker
Created 03/26/2009 - 11:18am


Nassim Taleb is an unlikely choice to play the Jimmy Stewart role in a 21st-century remake of the Depression-era classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1]. But the tale of a naive do-gooder who tries to remind a corrupt political class of its obligations was re-enacted this week when Taleb attended the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance conference in Washington, D.C.

A French- and Arabic-speaking former options trader with a taste for obscure Greek philosophers and the ambition to be seen as a literary figure, Taleb has grown famous for his book The Black Swan [2], which has sold 1.5 million copies around the world in 12 countries, with 19 more still to come. Although the book does not predict the current economic crisis per se, it rather loudly, elaborately, and—with a comically baroque form of storytelling—uniquely warns of the potential for a great catastrophe in the world economic system.

Now that the catastrophe is here, Taleb's anger at the economic establishment [3] that drove us over this cliff—and populates the Journal's conference—makes him a representative figure of ordinary people. Like most Americans, Taleb is seething with rage about the financial establishment's role in bringing the about credit crash. "Nobody saw the crisis coming," he says. "Bernanke, all these guys, I want them out. They proved incompetent, they crashed the plane."

Unlike us, the innumerately dumbstruck, Taleb is comfortable with the theory and practice that undergirds the whole system of options, derivatives, and risk management that has spun so recklessly out of control. That talent mixed with his righteous anger makes him a rare bird: an Everyman who can do the equations.

In private, Taleb takes a specific kind of glee in the wreckage of modern finance. He has been arguing for years that the "adult supervision" in the financial system—the worthy academics, regulators, and heads of the large banking institutions—has been deluding itself with talk of a great moderation. To Taleb, the supposed stability brought about by complex financial derivatives, global banking connections, and accelerated flows of capital was a mirage masking the accumulation of massive amounts of hidden risk.

For Taleb, along with that other Grand Guignol figure of the economic collapse, Nouriel Roubini, being right has meant sudden access to an elite that used to ignore him. It's hard to think of a more establishment figure than Alan Murray, the executive editor for the Wall Street Journal online. Murray is also the man who interviews the CEOs, politicians, and other worthies onstage when the Journal holds a conference. That makes him the public face of the Journal among the corporate elite.

In normal times, the conferencariat are an arrogant bunch. This is something Murray knows well from his travels on the conference circuit, which begins each year with the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Davos is usually filled with people who have all the answers," Murray says. "What was so striking about Davos this year was all these people, for once, didn't have all the answers. No one could tell you with certainty what was happening or what needed to be done."

No one but Nassim Taleb. Before Davos, Murray read The Black Swan. At the conference, the newspaperman and the trader had many conversations over the course of four days. Murray came to the conclusion that Taleb was the iconic figure of Davos in 2009. "In my mind, he had the perfect message for the moment."

So Murray invited Taleb to the Future of Finance Conference, where 100 grandees of the financial world, ranging from Steve Schwarzman and George Soros to Meredith Whitney, Peter Fisher, and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes, got together to outline some principles for rebuilding the financial system. The conference opened with Murray interviewing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner [4] fresh from his 497-point victory lap after the announcement of his plan to deal with the toxic mortgage-backed assets. It closed with a field trip to the White House and an audience with Lawrence Summers.

Nassim Taleb turned down the chance to kiss Summers' ring. He left after dinner the first night. While the 130-person conference debated the government's new regulations that George Soros described as merely "tinkering" [5] with the system, Taleb has a clear-eyed plan.

First, he says, we have to unmask the charlatans of risk like Myron Scholes. To Taleb, Scholes is the Great Oz in this Emerald City because his work on options and derivatives allowed the whole of the financial system to adopt poorly understood products-like the ones that brought AIG down-that hide risk. To Taleb, Scholes' academic work, which enabled the widespread use of complex derivatives, was like "giving children dynamite."

"This guy should be in a retirement home doing Sudoku," Taleb says. "His funds have blown up twice [6]. He shouldn't be allowed in Washington to lecture anyone on risk."

With complex derivatives unmasked and, in Taleb's vision of the future, outlawed, the next step is to create a more robust version of capitalism. Taleb calls it Capitalism 2.0. Robustness begins with a dismantling of debt. Leverage was the gas that inflated the financial system until it was too big, too fragile, and too volatile.

Over the past 20 years, the financial system has grown ever more complex. Building on a greater computing capacity and communication speed—"Bank runs now take place at the speed of BlackBerry"—Taleb recognizes that the financial system now possesses an efficiency that creates volatility. That cannot and will not go away.

We cannot have both debt leverage and a hyper-efficient system—the volatility is just too great. What Taleb explains—which no one else does—is that efficiency is already a form of leverage. A highly efficient system removes slack and magnifies small changes. Think of the efficient system as a high-performance aircraft. Each minute of steering input creates a rapid and violent shift of course, speed, or altitude. The system itself is souped up even before you add the debt. Once you do, the pilot is equally jacked up and twitchy, creating an explosive combination. Now imagine that fighter jet trying to fly in a 1,000-plane formation, and you get an idea of the world financial system in the 21st century.

We can't erase the technology that created the planes, so we'll have to make sure we fly sober, maybe even with an onboard computer that dampens the controls. That means getting rid of the debt. It's that simple.

A deleveraged financial system is a stable one, especially if we increase the redundancy within the system. That's an idea Taleb has taken from biology. But in finance, redundancy means two things: not having players in the game who are "too big to fail" and not allowing anyone—from the individual to the institution—to play with too much money. Redundancy means have cash on the side, not risking it all, and not becoming dependent upon financial assets for your economic well-being.

Did the conference see things Taleb's way? Not really. Back at the office, many of the financial leaders present had teams of analysts working on the government's newly proposed plan for toxic assets. Instead of deleveraging, here was a plan to use more leverage (provided by the government) to solve the excesses created by leverage.

(802: this is the same as what Jim Rogers said about throwing more money at a money problem)

Although Taleb was impressed with Geithner, his anger has hardly dissipated. "The center of the problem is that they don't know the center of the problem," he says. "They have not yet entertained the idea that what we may be witnessing is a total failure of a way of doing business."

It would be great to end this story the way Frank Capra ends Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: with a valiant filibuster that brings the country to its senses. But so far Washington and Wall Street are treating Taleb more like another Jimmy Stewart character, the one in Harvey [7], whose best friend is an invisible 6-foot rabbit.

[iam802]

Nassim on "The Black Swan's Political Calamity Precaution"

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1078661154&play=1

[LenaHuat]

I couldn't bring myself to really finish reading his book. But he's made the point :"If U do what others do, U will get the results others get". I consider pages 206 to 211 to be "Good Takeaways".

(Wow, this will be my 1399 post)

[b0rderc0llie]

Lol the author keep repeating after a while. But I enjoyed his first book "Fooled by randomness"

[iam802]

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4 ... ck_check=1

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Published: April 7 2009 20:02 | Last updated: April 7 2009 20:02

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

[LenaHuat]

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

Reminds me of Indonesia's Pancasila : Strength in Diversity, Diversity in Strength.
The world was not created equal. Camouflage and intrigue is part and parcel of earthly life, in both the animal, insect and human spheres. Teach children to be discerning and to judge well

[winston]

Global Crisis ‘Vastly Worse’ Than 1930s, Taleb Says (Update3) By Shiyin Chen and Netty Ismail

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- The current global crisis is “vastly worse” than the 1930s because financial systems and economies worldwide have become more interdependent, “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said.

“This is the most difficult period of humanity that we’re going through today because governments have no control,” Taleb, 49, told a conference in Singapore today. “Navigating the world is much harder than in the 1930s.”

The International Monetary Fund last month slashed its world economic growth forecasts and said the global recession will be deeper and the recovery slower than previously predicted as financial markets take longer to stabilize. Taleb said the current slump is the worst since the Great Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash.

The global economy is facing “big deflation,” though the risks of inflation are also increasing as governments print more money, Taleb told the conference organized by Bank of America- Merrill Lynch. Gold and copper may “rally massively” as a result, he added.

Taleb is a professor of risk engineering at New York University and also advises Universa Investments LP, a Santa Monica, California-based firm opened in 2007 by Mark Spitznagel, Taleb’s former trading partner.

Great Depression

The Great Depression saw an increase in global trade barriers and was only overcome after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies helped revive the U.S. economy.

Gold, copper and other assets “that China will like” are the best investment bets as currencies including the dollar and euro face pressures, Taleb said. The IMF expects the global economy to shrink 1.3 percent this year.

Gold, which is traditionally viewed as a hedge against accelerating consumer prices, jumped to a record $1,032.70 an ounce March 17, 2008. The metal for immediate delivery traded little changed at $910.88 at 12:32 p.m. Singapore time, up 3.6 percent this year.

Copper for three-month delivery on the London Metal Exchange has surged 55 percent this year on speculation demand will rebound as the global economy recovers from its worst recession since World War II. The metal, seen by some investors as a gauge of economic growth, stood at $4,748 a metric ton today.

Chinese Stimulus

Commodity prices are also gaining amid signs that China’s 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) stimulus package is beginning to work in Asia’s second largest economy. Quarter-on-quarter growth improved significantly in the first three months of 2009, the Chinese central bank said yesterday, without giving figures.

China will avoid a recession this year, though it will not be able to pull Asia out of its economic slump as the region still depends on U.S. demand, Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who predicted the financial crisis, said in an interview with Bloomberg News yesterday.

Equity investments are preferable to debt, a contributor to the current financial crisis, Taleb said. Deflation in an equity bubble will have smaller repercussions for the global financial system, he added.

“Debt pressurizes the system and it has to be replaced with equity,” he said. “Bonds appear stable but have a lot of hidden risks. Equity is volatile, but what you see is what you get.”

Credit Derivatives

Currency and credit derivatives will cause additional losses for companies that hold more than $500 trillion of the securities worldwide, Templeton Asset Management Ltd.’s Mark Mobius told the same Singapore conference today.

“There are going to be more and more losses on the part of companies that have credit derivatives, those who have currency derivatives,” Mobius, who helps oversee $20 billion in emerging-market assets at Templeton, said at the conference. “This is something we’re going to have to watch very, very carefully.”

Taleb said he was more worried about hedge funds than banks because of the risks they are taking.

“The risks won’t be taken by banks but by hedge funds,” he said. “How many hedge funds has the government bailed out? None. The banks are no longer going to be in that business of taking risks; they’re going to be facilitating other risk takers.”

Taleb is best known for his book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably.” The book, named after rare and unforeseen events known as “black swans,” was published in 2007, just before the collapse of the subprime market roiled global financial institutions.