Taleb: The Fed Will be Gone in 25 Years
In the video below, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, is interviewed about the economic crisis by the National Journal’s Matthew Cooper for the Washington Ideas Forum at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Taleb speaks openly about his disdain for Geithner, Krugman, and a raft of other “economists” that failed to see the crisis coming and don’t understand how to respond to it. Here are a few of his thoughts, paraphrased…
- If someone failed to predict the economic crisis before it happened then I don’t want to hear what that person has to say. If a person was able to see the crisis coming, then I want to hear what they have to say.
- Globalization has two negative side effects. First, it makes the whole system more reactive with more extreme effects. Second, specialization is also a problem. No one discusses the potato famine of 1850 in Ireland, but 2.5 million people had to leave the island, one million made it the US and 1.5 million died, and it was due to their specialization and monoculture.
- In the economy 25 years from now anything fragile will break, everything we’ve bailed out will break and it will cost us more. The Fed will be gone in 25 years because it “fragilizes” the country, and it will be gone and replaced by more organic things. The Fed is what got us in crisis, by trying to manage the economy and by pushing hidden risks that kept accumulating
You can view the clip below, which came to our attention via The Daily Bail in its post on Taleb publicly ridiculing Geithner and accusing Krugman of stealing assets from grandchildren.
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