TALEB'S BLACK SWAN SONGFORRAJVKS

摘要

NYU's Nassim Taleb, author of the unsettling bestseller The Black Swan, has made a career out of debunking economic truisms. So it's no surprise that he would see regulators' reliance on stress tests to ensure banks' stability as ill conceived. "To me, stress tests are just garbage," he told visitors to a recent NYU conference. Taleb likened the tests, which use past data to predict future results, to looking at deaths from wars predating 1914 to predict casualties in World War I. Still, he said, the tests may identify unexpected points of "fragility" in the banking system—including black swans.