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Anyone watching Tuesday’s US market cash session sees red across the board. One of the strongest selling programs in months dumped stocks, and equity volatility exploded to the upside. Quite frankly, this could be the beginning of a market storm. Ahead of what could be further market turmoil, Palantir Technologies warned about an upcoming “black swan event,” according to Bloomberg. The software company, co-founded by the technology billionaire Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp, wrote in a filing last week that it stockpiled $50.7 million in gold bars earlier this month. The filing also said it acquired technology startups, blank-check...

Jeff BerwickAugust 11, 2016 We are at an incredible moment in history. US stock markets are at nominal all-time highs. Government bonds are at or near all-time highs. Yet, central banks worldwide sit at 0% interest rates or less because things are too precarious to even raise rates a paltry 0.25% for fear of collapsing the entire system. In “traditional” economics this makes no sense. But we are far out of “traditional” now… we are in the extreme end-stages of a collapsing system. When that happens, nothing makes sense from a traditional/normal perspective. In the third quarter of 2015, during...

Elena Holodny January 15, 2015Societe Generale is out with its latest quarterly chart of "swan" risks — and it's looking pretty ominous. Technically speaking, "black swan" risks are by definition nearly impossible to predict — and when they come, it's bad. But the point that SocGen's swan chart is trying to show is there are economic and geopolitical risks stewing that could seriously rock the economy and the markets if they occur. Once again, further deterioration in the eurozone area is the most significant downside risk. The risk of a hard economic landing in China "somewhat eased," according to SocGen....

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a fantastic book on the impact of large, high impact, statistically rare events called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. According to Taleb, history tends to swing much more than we realize on these theoretically foreseeable, but often unexpected large events as opposed to the much more predictable trajectory that we tend to forecast when we look ahead to the future. Technically, Taleb would probably classify the events we're about to discuss as "grey swans," unlikely events that we should still be able to anticipate, but that's splitting hairs. Long story short, we...

Silver Black Swan If Rampant Speculation Is Not Reigned In Commodities / Gold and Silver 2011 Apr 23, 2011 - 11:49 AM By: Dian L Chu If you think the crude oil market has gone totally out of control in the past month or so, observe the Silver. The Silver market has basically gone parabolic the week of April 17, going from $41.75 on April 15th to $46.69 on April 21st--a 12% move in 5 trading days, topping off the move with a 5% move on Thursday (See Chart). As Silver is a thinly traded market, one thing the CME...

Fruitlessly Searching For Black Swan Events By Bill Bonner 03/22/11 Paris, France – Black swans…white swans…and big, nasty birds… The weather is beautiful here in Paris. The sun is shining. People are returning to sidewalk cafes. Trees and flowers are beginning to bud out and bloom. Early spring in Paris can be delightful…or horrible. Be sure to pack a warm sweater and a coat…and hope you don’t need them. Prepare for the worst; hope for the best. That is our unofficial motto, here at The Daily Reckoning. Dow plus 178 points yesterday. Oil over $100. The euro is rising (dollar...

Revolution In Egypt And Where To Be When Black Swans Appear By Bill Bonner 02/14/11 Baltimore, Maryland – Not much action in the stock market on Friday. Gold didn’t do much either. The big news was that Hosni Mubarak called it quits. After supporting him for 3 decades, the US threw him under a tank. Almost everywhere except the Mubarak household, people rejoiced. We were surprised they had an opinion, one way or the other. We got emails from strangers telling us what a “hopeful” development this was…or how “free elections” might be coming next. Typical was the report in...

About the strikingly successful proofs of Einstein’s “risky” or “counter-intuitive” predictions based on the relativity theorems, Karl Popper (http://www.geocities.com/healthbase/falsification.html) observed: “Now the impressive thing about this case is the risk involved in a prediction of this kind. If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation, in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected. This is quite different from the situation I have previously described, when it turned out that the theories in question were compatible with the most divergent...