Roubini and Taleb: A Tale of Fat Tails

By Rocky Vega

06/21/10 Stockholm, Sweden – The latest from New York University professor Nouriel Roubini and Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is that the risks of rare, “fat tail” events, with their associated financial costs, job losses, and income losses are, in modern times, getting much larger.

The full explanation is in the PBS News Hour clip below which came to our attention via a Daily Bail post on indebted grandchildren and double dips.

Here are two highlight quotes from the segment:

Roubini: The US today is having a budget deficit of $0.5 trillion this year, that’s 11 percent of US GDP, that’s not very far from the 13 percent of Greece. And the US is much bigger than Greece.

Taleb: The risks of debt are monstrous, and now we’re facing a future with even more debt. The only, you know, the only hope I had was that someone would do to us what the rest of the world, or Europe and the IMF, are doing to Greece. No democratically-elected government would take the right measure, would go through chemotherapy, would put its population through chemotherapy, which we need to do.

Rocky Vega