Monthly Archives: May 2010

Nassim Taleb Interview – The Brian Lehrer Show 052110

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HatTip to Dave Lull

Nassim Taleb Interview – The Brian Lehrer Show 052110

WNYC-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, former hedge fund advisor, professor, and author of the best-selling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House Trade Paperbacks; 2 edition, 2010), continues his exploration of randomness and the unpredictability of markets with the new edition of his book. Will the new financial reform bill help predict the next “Black Swan”?

Regulations are what got us here, because the regulators, with Basel ll, allowed banks to use measures of risk that were absolutely not scientific.
Give me a regulation and a cup of coffee and a few hours and I’ll come up with a way to beat that regulation… you see?

Keywords: economist detractors, hard assets, government bonds, fragility, robust to forecast errors, why should innocent future generations pay the price, failed auction, new suckers, long term interest rates, Paul Krugman, private debt to public debt, arbitrage tax laws or regulation, Basel ll, transparent derivatives trading, eliminating moral hazard from the system, punish people who make the mistakes, low debt, small size firms, society not bailing out failing companies

Nassim Taleb Issues for Investment Officers Now

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HatTip to Dave Lull.

 

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ai5000 interviews Nassim Taleb
This is a link to the streaming video (which wasn’t  playing very well the day I discovered it. Just added the YouTube links). So I made an audio recording of it. You’ll hear a few skips and pops and the last few seconds of the video wouldn’t play, but it’s interesting to hear NNT share a few more specifics of his (then, Feb 2010) investment strategy.

Nassim Taleb Feb. 2010 Issues for CIOs Now.mp3

What I call cash, I’ve changed my definition of cash, my cash is what I call the numerator. It’s not just cash because I’m afraid of inflation. So I have some inflation-linked securities, what I call repository of value. I have a collection of currencies and metals. So it’s a combination of inflation-linked currencies and metals, but very short term… treasury bills, from governments… is what I call cash.

Nassim at Lunch | Bryan Appleyard

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HatTip to Dave Lull

I had lunch with Nassim on Friday. He is one of the most intellectually gripping men on the planet. He is also full of helpful advice, based on Pareto distributions and other such exotica, on how to live one’s life. He applauded me for being seven minutes early – I am usually at least half an hour early – saying this was ideal, told me to spend no more than four hours a week on doing horrible things like, tax, bills and so on and strongly recommended walking downhill for back pain. The rest of the conversation was off the record and thrilling.