‘Black Swan’ Taleb Warns “Calm Before The Storm”
By: GoldCore
GoldSeek.com
Wednesday, 15 July 2015
– Is the apparent calm of the West a signal of latent instability?
– Increasing symptoms of instability in West as proposed by Nassim Taleb
– Wider public and mainstream press believe “experts” have everything under control
– Black Swan approaches and we may be experiencing “the calm before the storm”
Western countries are increasingly displaying symptoms of instability as described by Nassim Taleb, the author of the The Black Swan, even since the publication of an essay written with Gregory Treverton entitled “The Calm Before the Storm.”
The piece was published in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs – the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In their essay, Taleb and Treverton highlight five characteristics that could help identify states that – while appearing stable on the surface – may actually be quite fragile.
“Fragility”, they write, “is aversion to disorder”. Under this criterion they view Italy as a stable state.
The five characteristics they view as major factors in instability are:
– centralised decision making,
– lack of economic diversity
– high levels of debt and leverage
– absence of political variability
– lack of track record in surviving shocks
“Italy, paradoxically, shows no signs of fragility. It is effectively decentralized and has bounced back from perennial political crises. It also experiences a great deal of harmless political variability, cycling through 14 prime ministerial terms in the past 25 years.”
The Rest…HERE
