Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Concave and Convex.
(My notes) The banks have made 2.2 trillion over the last 2 years. Salary plus bonuses.
It is a tax on citizens. Bailout scheme, since Reagan.
You need something to break the bank cartel. Federal Reserve policy is there to help the banks. Last year they had record bonuses.
The ONLY valuable information you can get from bank earnings is how much they pay themselves.
Which is why I like the model of a hedge fund because at least you see what’s there.
$1.58 Billion put aside for compensation and bonuses.
If we bail you out, you should not be paid a bonus.
In business, if you have the upside, you’ve got to keep the downside.
The banks are in the business of hiding risk. They make steady money, collect bonuses, and when the thing collapses, we pay the price.
Hammurabi’s Code
Longtime reader and tipster David Lemus has a new book out.
Here’s a quote:
“So the statistics presented as the bell curve can at most work in one world. What polemic philosopher Nassim N. Taleb has called Mediocristan and Extremistan, the former domain is where statistics can be apply to physical measurements with miniscule margin of error like, say, astronomy, while the latter the bell curve breaks and shatters, the scientific tool cannot handle information data commonly acquire in social sciences. Too many stochastic variables, too many fat tails, and, furthermore, error rates, nonlinearties, dispersions: what Taleb named Fragile and the opposite his appellation Anti-Fragile; and improbable, consequential and explained by narrative, events, which cannot be predicted, I.e., Black Swans completely demolishes the statistical model; although they can be mitigated to a point by using robust heuristics as Mr. Taleb himself has suggested.”
BBC Newsnight Friday 19th Aug 2011
Lecturing Birds on How to Fly: