When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Hunter S. Thompson

17 July 2008

Black swans and banking

Complex systems don’t allow for slack and everybody protects that system. The banking system doesn’t have that slack. In a normal ecology, banks go bankrupt every day. But in a complex system there is a tendency to cluster around powerful units. Every bank becomes the same bank so they can all go bust together.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, interviewed in the Times of London, 1 June 2008

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