Monthly Archives: October 2010

`Black Swan' Author Says Investors Should Sue Nobel for Crisis – Bloomberg

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Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan.” Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of
“The Black Swan,” said investors who lost money in the
financial crisis should sue the Swedish Central Bank for
awarding the Nobel Prize to economists whose theories he said
brought down the global economy.

“I want to make the Nobel accountable,” Taleb said today
in an interview in London. “Citizens should sue if they lost
their job or business owing to the breakdown in the financial
system.”

Taleb said that the Nobel Prize for Economics has conferred
legitimacy on risk models that caused investors’ losses and
taxpayer-funded bailouts. Sweden’s central bank will announce
the winner of this year’s award on Oct. 11.

Taleb singled out the Nobel award to Harry Markowitz,
Merton Miller and William Sharpe in 1990 for their work on
portfolio theory and asset-pricing models.

"He thinks poetically", said Hannah Arendt about Walter Benjamin, patron saint of flaneurs (he did his "flaner" in Paris no less, where I am now "walking slowly", the 2nd best city for flaneurs -I will not reveal the 1st). There are other poetic philosophers…


http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/10/07/quand-la-poesie-fait-chavirer-la-raison_1421477_3260.html

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“He thinks poetically”, said Hannah Arendt about Walter Benjamin, patron saint of flaneurs (he did his “flaner” in Paris no less, where I am now “walking slowly”, the 2nd best city for flaneurs -I will not reveal the 1st). There are other poetic philosophers…

http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/10/07/quand-la-poesie-fait-chavirer-la-raison_1421477_3260.html


Quand la poésie fait chavirer la raison – LeMonde.fr
www.lemonde.fr
Le Monde.fr – Les philosophes rêvent-ils ? Le plus simple est d’interroger l’auteur du “Discours de la méthode”.

Blame Nobel for crisis, says author of Black Swan | Reuters

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Shared by JohnH

Note: From the Globe and Mail (Check comments, Mark informs us that NNT was aware of this in TBS, so in fact, it’s the Globe and Mail author who got it wrong).
http://goo.gl/Sd61

The next prize winner will be revealed to great public acclaim or, more typically, puzzlement on Oct. 11. But what neither Mr. Taleb nor most other people realize is that none of the above actually won a Nobel Prize — at least not the official one set up in the name of the late dynamite mogul.

What the gaggle of economic theorists have actually scored is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, which is paid for by the Swedish central bank “in memory of Alfred Nobel,” who set aside nothing from his vast fortune to honour economists.

Nassim Taleb speaks to reporters at the Reuters Finance Summit in New York November 16, 2005.

 

 

 

Credit: Reuters By Adam Cox

STOCKHOLM |
Tue Sep 28, 2010 9:40am EDT

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Did the Nobel prize help trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

Nassim Taleb, who shot to fame with his ideas about risk in the book “The Black Swan,” believes the economics award and the theories it celebrates deserve their share of blame.

“I want to remove the harm from these economic models. And the Nobel is not helping. They should be held partly responsible, if not largely responsible, for the crisis,” Taleb told Reuters by telephone.

The first of the Nobel awards will be announced next Monday, with the economics prize due a week later on Oct 11.

According to Taleb, there are a number of mistaken ideas about forecasting and measuring risk, which all contribute to events like the 2008 global crisis. The Nobel prize, he says, has given them a stamp of approval, allowing them to propagate.