Black Swan Event: Can This Economic Crisis be Worse than the Great Depression?

Black Swan events are said to be impossible events.  That is until they happen.  The PBS News Hour has an interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the famous economist who authored The Black Swan and his mentor Dr. Mandelbrot who is a professor of Mathematics who has done research on chaos theory.  It is a fascinating interview and the crux of the argument is that we are so interconnected, that a hiccup in one part of the economy will send shivers down the spine of the entire system.

Take a look at the fall of Lehman Brothers for example.  During the Great Depression, thousands of banks failed but many were lightly connected.  Now with the failure of Washington Mutual one big bank failure is the equivalent of hundreds of smaller banks.

Watch the 10 minute interview:

black swan

*Click to watch full video clip

RSSIf you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!

If you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!
TAGS:




1 Comments on this post

Trackbacks

  1. CompassionateFascist said:

    Video disabled; like our economy. Actually, the situation is even worse than you economic folks think, because the political system is corrupted and broken too. Most likely Black Swan, leading to skyrocketing oil price, Japan and China dumping dollars and TBs, global run on dollar, then US dollarcollapse and US economic collapse, followed by martial law and Civil War II: the Iran War, no later than spring-summer 2012. Maybe sooner.

    July 7th, 2010 at 10:09 pm

LEAVE A COMMENT

Subscribe Form

Subscribe to Blog

Categories

Archives