
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Sees Worse Tail Risks Than in 2007 [video] - ry4n413
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-05-18/taleb-sees-worse-tail-risks-than-in-2007-video
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tim333
tl;dr his main point re the markets is that they are priced higher than 2007
so have further to fall. He implies unhedged stock ownership is not rational
at this point.

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SomeStupidPoint
Is there a text summary of his point somewhere?

I absolutely _hate_ video for this sort of thing.

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Mathnerd314
Just open the network summary in the developer tools and find the XML request
that gets sent when you turn on closed captions.

Taleb's speech, summarized & cleaned up a little, for the lazy:

Donald Trump is the fellow who never had a supervisor in his life. No boss. So
he does not know how to express things in a way that a supervisor can
understand. You have to translate what he says. The reason he fired James
Comey is he [trump] does not collude with the Russians.

There are a lot of things that Trump came to do that are substantial. The
first one is after 32 years, fixing the tax code. The tax code is something
that is metastatic. Unless someone cuts the whole thing, you need someone
aggressive. Number two is obamacare is a disaster. The real train wreck is
globalization; I wrote about it in "the black swan." unfettered globalization
leads to a conflagration of companies. He wants to fix some of the things in
the system that are not sustainable. That is the third point. The fourth point
is we have a problem with what we call the pseudo-elite. Last 10 years it's
been swelling. Not just Obama, although it accelerated greatly under Obama.
The pseudo-experts, I describe them as incapable of finding a coconut on
coconut island but because they have an ivy league degree, they are given a
position. You need to replace these people, with do-ers. Number five is Trump
came on a platform of non-interventionism. In terms of foreign policy. I am
anti-metastatic bureaucracy running stuff like that. You need someone to fix
the system. He is aggressive enough on this platform but he may not deliver
and I am very worried that this is not what I see from his recent actions.

The thing I disagree with Donald Trump on is he came in with the market on a
high. Trump should disassociate himself from the market. Trump is claiming
credit on the market he is getting, he is buying it on the highs. That is not
rational. He should disengage himself in the market because he hasn't
inherited a good situation. Obama has artificially stabilized the market for
the past 8 years. Claiming credit for the rise in the market makes Trump
vulnerable, if that Novocain is removed. In my opinion, we have risk today we
did not have before; everyday it gets worse. You have a huge, considerable
rise in the stock market. I would tell you today that if you own stocks
without a hedge, it's not rational. The last time we were here I explained my
research. If you are exposed to tail risks, you are alpha and future returns
will be divorced from the return of the market. People don't realize that.
It's like buying a house without insurance. You cannot really look at what
will happen to your house based on the housing market, unless you are hedged.

\--

I didn't bother including the title quote about 2007, it seems out-of-context
and kind of irrelevant. The interviewer put words in Taleb's mouth and Taleb
didn't reject them out of hand. It's not Taleb's main point by any stretch,
and 2007 is too specific a date for the kinds of trends Taleb is discussing.

Tail hedging strategy is explained in many places, e.g.
[https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about-
a-s...](https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about-a-stock-
market-crash-heres-how-you-can-tail-hedge-your-portfolio/)
[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/mark-spitznagel-
val...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/mark-spitznagel-value-tail-
hedged-equities) I don't really know enough about finance to evaluate it.

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mikeyouse
If Taleb had published the Black Swan and then retired, he would have been a
legend. Instead he keeps talking and it becomes clear that there isn't much
difference between him and someone like Peter Schiff.

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taw55
It appears his claim to faim was 2008, which imo wasn't a black swan event at
all (to anyone watching private sector indebtedness figures).

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wand3r
That's a very small pool of people.

