Shared by JohnH

HatTip to Dave Lull!

I spoke to best-selling author Nassim Taleb on the phone who wrote the famous business book the “Black Swan,” which identifies situations that have mathematical multiplier effect due to their unforeseen power. In the 2008 banking crisis it was $60 trillion of exposure to vast leveraged debts that the financial system could not handle.

Taleb says the U.S. government made the same mistake with Mubarak that it has done with its large scale banks. It has funded him since the peace accord with Israel, so much so that he became too big to fail, and the only choice now left is to bail him out against the will of Egyptians themselves. This may buy some time, but similar to the massive exposure of a Lehman Brothers, Mubarak may very well turn out to be the next black swan.

More people died today (from nonstandard trauma) in Germany (where I am) than in Egypt.
http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2011/01/30/dix-morts-dans-une-collision-ferroviaire-en-allemagne_1472700_3214.html

Dix morts dans une collision ferroviaire en Allemagne – LeMonde.fr
www.lemonde.fr
Le Monde.fr – Un train de voyageurs et un train de marchandises se sont percutés pour une raison encore inconnue. Entre 10 et 20 personnes sont dans un état critique.

His two lay books, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, are only samples of his work.  If you want to judge him, read his technical book Dynamic Hedging, and his published papers, starting at SSRN.com:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_d… (There are actually 14 papers total, but 6 aren't showing up on this page.  Search the main search field on SSRN.com for ‘Taleb’ for the complete list)

His website also has a section on his scholarly work as well:

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/

Regarding his credibility in academia, besides Terry Tao's informal endorsement (or whatever you consider Terry's static sidebar link to Taleb's main non-book work to be), the late Berkeley statistician David Freedman also commented in a posthumously published paper that "efforts by statisticians to refute Taleb proved unconvincing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav…

Anyone here from Egypt? I am trying to get sponsored by a U.S./U.K. newspaper to go to Cairo with some press card (at the cost of writing some article about Fragility/AntiFragility that would confuse the editors & hopefully be rejected). I have no interest in journalism, I just want to take a look/feel history.