Ok, so maybe I'm not the most pessimistic person out there. My husband found this interesting NewsHour interview with Taleb and Mandelbrot which I highly recommend for anyone seeking a good dose of realism.
My favorite quote:
Taleb: Never in the history of the world have we faced so much complexity combined with so much incompetence and understanding of its properties ... I think that we may be experiencing something that is vastly worse than we think it is.
...
BENOIT MANDELBROT: Everything is a possibility ... Everything is imaginable. What's the joke, that prediction is very easy when you predict the past or something.
As I sat in an interview in Monday giving my predictions about the future state of the world, I felt rather silly. I know as money managers we're not allowed to be uncertain - but what I'm really thinking is 'I have absolutely no bloody idea what will happen and neither do you'. None of us do. Ever. Which is partly why I think I might like to get out of the prediction industry and into the doing something industry.
And I found this Reuters article (just one of many on the topic) absolutely galling. I don't have a stitch of pity for all the homeowners who overbought and overspent over the past 4 years. They all deserve bankruptcy but unfortunately they may take us all down with them.
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