Benoit Mandelbrot and Nicholas Taleb "The Black Swan" were just interviewed by Paul Salomon on PBS THIS IS A MUST SEE

Mods please consider this for a pin. I don't know how to link the interview to this thread or I would have done so perhaps one of you could do it. Thanks.

I was fortunate enough to have watched it, too. Actually, the one guy (?) said we have never, in the history of the world, faced this complicated financial morass. It's a tangled-up mess. He said he used to wake up in the morning with this on his mind; now he wakes up in the night begging he'll be proven wrong.

Those two men are sharp but, like everybody else, without mathematical info, they can make nothing but a dire prediction. From where they're sitting, and with what calculations they can make, we are looking at DOOMSDAY.
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[link to www.pbs.org]

PBS TV

Bottom line, per Mandelbrot: anything is possible.

OTOH, if a global economy requires a global currency, then the current fabricated crisis has a foregone conclusion & recovery is not possible, regardles of how PBS, just another MSM/PTB shill, tries to spin it.

I still don't see it there.

Which link?

That's what it appears to the case as things play out.

Here is the actual audio file link of the interview!
[link to www-tc.pbs.org]

I saw it. Mandelbrot was a little hard to understand. Both seem to think this crisis is unique and will be devastating. What do you expect? The economics of the world is collapsing. Hate to see so many suffer to bring down TPTB. Mankind is resiliant.

MAYBE. Don't forget the change to urban societies has completely changed the concomitant.

Someone kindly typed up portions of the interview:

Taleb: "I don't know... if we're entering the most difficult period since, not since the Great Depression -- since the American Revolution".

Q: The most serious situation we've been in since the American Revolution?

Taleb: Yeah.

Q: Professor Mandelbrot, can that possibly be true?

Mandelbrot: It's very serious.

Q: More serious than the Great Depression possibly?

Mandelbrot: Possibly. I hope not.

Taleb: Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence and understanding its properties.

A little later on, after discussing how turbulence in the markets can crash the system:

Taleb: Now you understand why I'm worried. I hope I'm wrong. I wake up every morning - actually I don't wake every morning now, I start to wake up at night the past couple weeks hoping I'm wrong. Begging to be wrong. I think that we may be experiencing something that is vastly worse than we think it is.

Q: And we think it's pretty bad.

Taleb: It's worse.

Discussion of how a shock to the system can have much worse consequences across the world.

Taleb: I am convinced the package recently of $700 billion is pocket money. Because you don't understand.. they don't understand that the ripple effect that hedge funds have, okay, that the banks not lending to hedge funds will force hedge funds to liquidate positions.

Q: Sell off-

Taleb: Sell off positions. These positions sold off by hedge funds will impact other entities.

Q: Driving down the price.

Taleb: Driving down the price, driving down some prices. That... a supermarket, okay, needing funding will not be able to find a bank solvent enough to lend them money against inventory to make payroll, okay. You may have chain reactions we never imagined before. These come from the intricate relationships in the system we don't understand.


Mandelbrot says he sleeps a bit better than Taleb, but still doesn't sleep very well.

The questioner then basically hopes the system will somehow just right itself. Mandelbrot says anything is possible.

The previous reply has captured the essence of the conversation. For those who don't know Nicholas Taleb wrote a book postulating what he refers to as the black swan which is part of the title. Succinctly put the idea is that the general belief on a worldwide basis was that there were only white swans because that was all anyone had ever seen in otherwards events with predictable outcomes swan= white. This was accepted as the gospel until they discovered a black swan in Australia which completely obliterated the previous theory. Now apply that to the current economic disruption and you have what is causing him to lose sleep at night.

To watch the interview you have to go to PBS for 10/21.

if these guys are disturbed then there is good reason to be concerned

for those of you that think this economic situation has been planned, I will say this:

The complexity of the situation is uncontrollable. You don't just simply destroy a system and replace it with another, as there are far-reaching implications that can influence other systems to behave erratically, including the systems of control.

Whatever the nature of this crisis is, its origin lies in arrogance and human meddling.

Heres the main page with links to audio and streaming video:

[link to www.pbs.org]

I've been a fan of Mandelbrot for 20 years or so. When he speaks, I listen.

Chilling stuff.

bump

Mandelbrot everything ...

Sometimes I wonder about Mandelbrot. The very key to our reality is fractals. But he (seemingly) limits it to financial analysis, coastlines, patterns in nature. WE are patterns in nature, CONSCIOUSNESS is a pattern in nature. Does he know this?

Last Edited by v0rtex666 on 04/10/2010 07:13 PM

OK, but simple question that even the author did not want to address (perhaps he never even considered it) is this.
What happened when the Black swan was sighted?
Did the world end?
Did other white swans die?
Did other white swans mate with the Black one right away and as a result all future swand ended up being Gray?
Did the waters, environment, weather etc turn upside down?

NO, None of these things happened. Discovery of the Black swan was a new and amazing event that the whole world had not encountered before but when it did happen, It created surprise, worry, excitment, a bit of panick but in the end it was simply accepted as something new.

Its easy for the writer to set up a book and use analogies, brainwashing sheeple and no one can ask questions regarding his examples but for those who do ask as to what happened next, the answer becomes obviouse and not what the author wants you to see.
After all, he writes to make money and no other reason. His excuse of wanting to inform the public is just a scam.

What says you?

The point here was that since no one had seen a black swan it was considered impossible that such a creature could exist. Likewise, on a societal basis they were saying that just because the world economies had not experienced something does IN NO WAY preclude it from happening. As I recall it dealt with the possibility of currency deflation coupled with hyperinflationary price increases at the same time. It has been a long time since I put this thread up.