Salient to Investors: Nassim Taleb said: Over the last 2000 years, there is no no statistical evidence that violence has dropped, or that the frequency or magnitude of wars is declining. People are lulled into a false sense of security because of the nature of fat tail events, which can
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb says: The UK and the US have a fantastic history in risk-taking, in trial and error, without shame in failing and starting again. We must honor the “ruined” risk-takers with as much respect as we do soldiers – there is no such thing as
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Mary Schapiro, the former chairman of the SEC is joining a firm loaded with former government financial-services regulators. Schapiro previously ran FINRA, Wall Street’s self-appointed watchdog. Alan Blinder at Princeton is a co-founder of Promontory Interfinancial Network which offers Insured Cash Sweep, which splits large deposits into
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul Farrell writes: We are at a market top and an economic turning point. Bernanke’s non-stop cheap-and-easy-money printing presses are loved by Wall Street banks but are bad for the rest of America. His reappointment – certain to become Obama’s greatest domestic blunder – so shocked Nassim Taleb
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kenneth Heebner at the CGM Focus Fund has bet 21 percent of his find on a decline in U.S. Treasuries as the growing US economy eventually prompts the Fed to boost interest rates. At the end of 2012, the fund was 29 percent invested in banks, 24 percent in homebuilders. Heebner said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb says: Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the efficiency that makes people sail too close to the wind. We must make our public and private lives less vulnerable to randomness and chaos, but also “antifragile” — positioned to
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nassim Taleb writes: (Excerpted from “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”) Imagining future technologies is unpredictable and won’t be the ones that make it. The futuristic projections made throughout the past 150 years by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, George Orwell and other scientists and futurists are not tools
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nassim Taleb says there’s a simple mathematical basis for why governments continually miss their deficit targets. The problem is that the economic data forecasts the government uses are taken as a given and not looked at as mere probable likelihoods. The government tends to underestimate the damage when things get worse
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