The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Beware moral hazard with bonus payments.

On the other hand, research ventures show a less rosy past history. A biotech company (usually) faces positive uncertainty, while a bank faces almost exclusively negative shocks.

Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risk.

Beware presentations of risk numbers.

Find the smart people

whose hands are clean.

Equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.”

Economic life should be definancialized. We should learn not to use markets as warehouses of value: they do not harbor the certainties that normal citizens can require, in spite of “expert” opinions.

Citizens should experience anxiety from their own businesses (which they control), not

from their investments (which they do...

if I gave you a nice house and a Lamborghini, put a million dollars in your bank account, and provided you with a social network, then, a few months later, took everything away, you would be much worse off than if nothing had happened in the first place.

Seneca’s credibility as a moral philosopher (to me) came from the fact that, unlike other philosophers, he did not denigrate the value of wealth, ownership, and property because he was poor.