Nassim Taleb & Benoit Mandelbrot on PBS Newshour talk about the current ecology of the financial industry during 2008 Financial Crisis (Air date October 21, 2008).
Transcript available here: Top Theorists Examine Rippling Economic Turbulence As the financial sector shifts, so does the reach of the jolt to economic structures around the world. Economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, speak with Paul Solman about chain reactions and predicting the financial crisis.
A peculiar video on YouTube titled “Nassim Nicholas Taleb” and only coming with the vague description: “Tips on life from a man who’s done a lot of thinking and knows a lot of people.” It is not clear who this video is from, possibly Nassim himself but unlikely, probably more likely a friend/acquaintance. As he describes at the start it is filmed at Heathrow Airport Terminal, a place he often criticises for being terribly designed and over optimized, the planners obviously having no appreciation of the non-linear effects of congestion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan,” is about the power of randomness. Coincidentally, he was also the winner of Stephen’s Pull a Guest Out of a Hat Sweepstakes.
Paul Solman explains “hedge funds” and why “Black Swan” events make it harder than might be expected to reduce investment risk (October, 2006).
Transcript:
“Nassim: The difference between Hedge Funds, and Mutual Funds, is that Mutual Funds take your money and they have a lot of constraints on what they can do for you. A Hedge Fund has usually more freedom, to invest, to make bets, to gamble, to do whatever you want.
Paul: OK lets take it back to 2000, I have a lot of finance professor friends, so of whom would presumably go on my board. People know me on television as a financial somethingerather. Do you think I could have actually started a Hedge Fund?
Nassim: You would have billions under management currently.
Paul: I would have billions??
Nassim: Yes, because all you would had to do was go to university and pickup a couple professors ok, hire a couple risk managers–usually they have a foreign accent, you know they’re quants…
Paul: Quants??
Nassim: Quants, like me, my background is a quant.
Paul: [to the camera] Quants, as in quantitative types, so called financial engineers like Taleb, himself a mathematician, a Hedge Fund owner, and author of a steeply sceptical book on investing called Fooled by Randomness.
Nassim: All you had to do is provide these steady returns, or, the illusion of low-risk returns.”
