Friday, July 03, 2009

Nassim Taleb: Monetary Policy Is Out of Control

Monetary Policy is out of control says Black Swan author Nassim Taleb in an interview at CNBC.

Some noteworthy quotes

-Don’t be fooled by complex system, you can have a positive number, but that doesn’t mean anything. System is very fragile, your talking about something that is deleveraging

-You may have a temporary relief but you still are in a world that is breaking, and that world should break…gonna break.

-Whatever is fragile in complex system breaks, in other words, you took at nature, nature breaks anything that is too big, not to create interdependency just to reach equilibrium.

-We’re in a middle of a crash

-If I am going to forecast something I know its going to get worst not better.

-If things start breaking as you can see it, they break much harder than they build themselves

-Monkey on our back is debt.

-Instead of deflating debt they are thinking of inflating assets, actually they even don’t know what they are doing. They’re doing lot of contradictory things.

-Hyperinflation is a mechanism that’s very vicious. Because all you need is for people to think there’s gonna be inflation to start hoarding. So it’s a perceptional mechanism and TIPS won’t save you from that. If you have TIPS, TIPs pays you nominal inflation but expectations can go wild.

-My statement is not that we are going to have hyperinflation, my statement is that Monetary policy is out of control.

-What makes me very pessimistic in not seeing any leadership or awareness on parts of government on what has to be done, which is deleverage $40-to-$70 trillion

-Those who basing themselves on past history, don’t know anything about history, because we are in an environment that doesn’t resemble the past at all.




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