Free Republic

COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow........ But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming? Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical...

The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling The Black Swan, our susceptibility to “the role of the exceptional event leading to the degradation of predictability.” A “black swan” is characterized by three attributes: “it is a rarity,” “it causes an extreme impact,” and we come to understand it only “after the fact.” The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was such a “black swan” --...

We are watching the coronavirus pandemic being used to collapse the existing global system to make way for the coming New World Order, and nothing will ever again be the same. As you read this, over one-third of the world is on lockdown, with more countries issuing the order by the day. The morgues in New York City are filled to capacity, with no place to store the dead bodies. Officials were told that morgues in the city are expected to reach capacity next week, per the briefing. A third person familiar with the situation in New York said some...

Some financial writers have claimed that stock market crashes such as followed the 2007 Bubble are unpredictable and rare, calling them “Black Swan” events. More recently, the Covid-19 health threat has been described as a “Black Swan” event. Making the two together about as “Black Swanny” as it gets. However, a review of history suggests that severe financial crashes have always followed great financial bubbles. The transitions to busts have had much in common and the methodical pattern strongly suggests that even the greatest of crashes since the first in 1720 have predictable characteristics. Therefore, severe financial panics cannot be...

Sequoia Capital, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, issued a "black swan" warning on Thursday about the Covid-19 outbreak. In a memo to Sequoia founders, employees, and CEOs of its portfolio companies, it provided "guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while dealing with potential business consequences of the spreading effects of the coronavirus." Time - Sequoia - Warning - RIP - Good The last time Sequoia sent out a warning like this, it was titled "RIP. Good Times," and sent to its portfolio companies with some tips for surviving the 2008 financial crisis. Sequoia calls...

after this, you’ll welcome obstacles “The general principle of antifragility, it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.” – Nassim Taleb“Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.” – Nassim Taleb“They have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into the man’s best domesticated animal.” – Friedrich Nietzsche  The ideas in this post have been the most transformative in my life over the last couple years. I avoided writing about them because I didn’t feel I could. Finally, I feel that I’ve internalized, tested, and understand them...

As of January 21st, China’s Communist Party confirmed 473 cases of the Coronavirus, mostly concentrated in Mainland China, Wuhan Provence, but the world doubted the accuracy of what was reported, particularly since the method for counting confirmed cases keeps changing. The most current confirmed cases are 79,498 with total deaths reported at 2,621. Even as China says the spread is slowing, globally the spread is picking up. Particularly troubling is what is happening in Italy, with 3 reported cases last week and 219 and 5 deaths reported today. At this writing, 33 countries have reported cases and this pandemic is...

It's hard to tell if the superheated response by the Left (the media) to the coronavirus outbreak from China is due to there being a slow news cycle (which is hard to believe), a legitimate news story with U.S. ramifications, or as something to tattoo Donald Trump with a 'Hurricane Katrina' moment. As the media have amply shown, their zeal to tag President Trump with the most cockamamie accusations knows no bounds. Remember, some of these people still cling to the fiction that Trump is a Russian agent. They won't take "no" and multiple exhaustive investigations for an answer. As...

I've been following author Nassim Taleb for several years now.  His claim to fame was his 2007 book Black Swan which brought the term black swan event into the English vocabulary. What I've done here is transcribe and edit-down a talk Taleb gave in India (2018) where he explains the key principles in his newest book, Skin in the Game. Enjoy. Very rarely have I seen Taleb mentioned on Free Republic, but there's a lot for FReepers to like: Taleb is smart and opinionated wordsmith and historian who hates big bureacracies and doesn't suffer fools.  Perhaps he hasn't come...

Fed Admits Failure of ‘Plan A’ to Control Money Market Rates, Shifts Back to Repos (which was ‘Plan A’ till 2008) The hullabaloo in the repo market torpedoed the function of Interest on Excess Reserves and forced the Fed to go back to the future. With its announcement this morning, the New York Fed confirmed that the Fed’s Plan A of manipulating the federal funds rate into its target range – now between 1.75% and 2.0% — has miserably failed, and that it will switch to Plan B to control short-term interest rates. But this Plan B used to...

President Donald Trump is calling on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by at least a full percentage point "over a fairly short period of time," saying that such an action would make the U.S. economy even better and would also "greatly and quickly" enhance the global economy. In two tweets Monday, Trump kept up his pressure on the Fed and its chairman Jerome Powell, saying the U.S. economy was strong "despite the horrendous lack of vision by Jay Powell and the Fed." Powell is Trump's hand-picked choice for the top Fed job. He said Democrats were trying to...

To be fair, the list is 13 risks long and it’s mostly populism driven. But there is some Elon, as advertised: And note, as Barc’s commods team does, that “Indices are already pricing in record levels of volatility as 2017 begins, and investors are specifically concerned about geopolitical developments.” Finally by way of additional context, and as a reminder that commods did ok in 2016: Hard to disagree with Citi's Matt King – the orderliness of markets recently – even with the bond sell-off – has been striking and strange: pic.twitter.com/wUZppgxjRC — Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) January 5, 2017

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define...

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...

Live coverage of the result of the EU referendum. This is a live BBC stream starting at 21:55 BST.

Political risk has rarely had a more powerful impact on markets. As we head toward November, we must dig in and get to the bottom of what’s really going on. A reality TV star and real estate mogul just mowed down 17 accomplished Republican candidates, by May 3rd it was all over but the shouting. “Investors need to prepare for a Trump presidency.” Jeff Gundlach, May 2016 Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015, to criticism, mockery, and doubt by the media and political class. Trump’s candidacy and campaign have been called a joke by many...

Sometimes, less is more, and in infamous "Black Swan" philosopher Nassim Taleb's case, summing up the chaos that is enveloping America, and its forthcoming election was as simple as the following: "The *establishment* composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other "well thinking" members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments." To which he appended the following 17 perfectly succinct words: "People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally,...

GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally at The Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, IA on Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 2:00 PM CST. Watch the live stream and replay of the event below.

There is a potential black swan event taking place in Turkey on Sunday and no one seems to care. That is, the media isn’t devoting nearly enough coverage to Turkish elections considering the impact the outcome will invariably have on the situation in Syria, on the fate of the lira, and on the Pentagons strategy with regard to embedding spec ops with the YPG. As a reminder, Turkey held elections back in June and the outcome did not please President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. AKP lost its absolute majority in parliament thanks in no small part to a relatively strong showing...

I really had not been paying much attention to the Puerto Rico debt situation. After all, $72 billion in debt that might go bad – big deal. The Fed can print up $72 billion in credit lines with the push of a button. But a friend of mine happened to mention to me today (Monday) that MBIA’s stock was down over 23% and Assured Guaranty’s stock was down over 13%. That woke me up. Companies like MBI and AMBAC underwrite credit “enhancement” guarantees on these massive cesspools of debt – and the associated derivatives that are “wrapped around” the debt...