Before The Black Swan was published, Taleb had been a prophet without honour in the United States. “I knew before the crash that the system was going to blow up. In 2003, I went to the New York Times and said, ‘Fannie Mae [the Federal National Mortgage Association] is sitting on dynamite with taxpayers’ money. These guys are going to blow up with my money because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing risk-wise.’” But the “Gray Lady” didn’t listen. “I just had smear campaign after smear campaign.”
Taleb is currently engaged in a feud with the Times’s star columnist Thomas Friedman “He’s after me now”, whom he lambasts in the book for being a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Like the senior executives at the bailed-out banks, Friedman “paid no price for his mistakes”.
via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A thinker with an antifragile ego.
when a bank makes a loan – they have to service it – and its directors and officers have to sign off on its accounting books; that and paying their bonuses in bank stock will give them skin in the game. remember “he who sells what he doesn’t own must buy it back or go to prison”? ethics are cheaper and better than bailouts. take the long road – a quarter of a century – not a quarter of a year – to profits.