Nassim Taleb Debated Larry Summers Last Week, And He Is NOT Happy With How Summers Behaved
derr risks..derr risks..derr didn’t know derr risk..derrr..derrr
ROFL cry me a river. Did the liberal Nicolas Nassim Taleb lose his temper once again, in addition to his debate with the redoubtable Larry Summers? Is that why he’s always mad, to compensate for being wrong all the time? lol His only retort is to call ‘bullshit’ when facts, tactfullness, and reason cannot suffice. As some may recall, a couple years ago he notably got his butt handed to him by the intellectually superior Steven Pinker.
“I was fighting with a bully,” Taleb said of Summers’ performance, later adding, “It’s very strange for a Harvard professor to act like a cheap politician.”
No, according to the audience you were losing. And rather than take it like a man, you are a petulant sore loser.
In the debate, he maintained that ‘too big to fail’ is still very much a reality, that bankers were never punished for their recklessness and as such will remain reckless.
Too big to fail policy was a resourding success, lib. By 2011, the treasury reported a profit. Six years later, and financial conditions couldn’t be better in terms of record reserves at major financial institutions, record high stock prices, record profits & earnings, etc. Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner are the unsung heroes of this unending economic and stock market boom, all thanks to TARP. TARP indirectly created trillions of dollars in wealth through the 140%+ percent rally in stocks, the web 2.0 boom, the real estate boom, the economic boom, etc. Even Warren Buffet knows TARP was a success. Funny how such a successful program is so unpopular, compared to, say, social security which is projected to be insolvent in a few decades. Also, Taleb never answers how long banks shoud bear the consequences of recieving federal money, even after they have reformed.
From the intro page, we continue:
We believe in policy that creates wealth, which is why we support the federal reserve, quantitative easing, and limited crony capitalism yet oppose entitlement spending. We’re also rapacious capitalists, supporting individual freedom to create wealth under a free market. How do we reconcile support of bank bailouts and free market capitalism? Bank bailouts and defense spending, for example, represent an optimal allocation of wealth. Through the $750 billion TARP bailout, trillions of dollars were indirectly created through gains in stocks market, businesses expansion, and real estate. If the GOP is supposed to be a party of wealth creation, it behooves it to support policy that creates wealth, like the bailouts and quantitative easing. TARP ended the crisis and got things running smoothly again so that the healthier sectors of the economy, like retail and technology and would no longer sustain the collateral damage of the ailing financial sector. The irony is that TARP helped the free market thrive by quickly ending the crisis; just six months after its passage the market marked a bottom and hasn’t looked back since. QE further helped create an environment conductive for growth after traditional monetary policy measures had been used.
However the world isn’t perfect and like it or not governments intervene in crisis. They did in 2008 and will again in the future. We are lucky to have Larry otherwise things would be a lot worse.
quoted for truth
Funny how someone who wrote Antifragile could have such a fragile ego