Friday, April 24, 2015

Why is the social demand for hate increasing so much?

Why is the social demand for hate increasing so much, in a world where so much good advancements have supposedly been achieved? 

Might it be some are wetting the appetite for hate? Is that their business model?

If so, who?

You tell me.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

My early calls for the sort of antifragility expressed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his “Antifragile” of 2012.


"A mixture of thousand solutions, many of them inadequate, may lead to a flexible world that can bend with the storms. A world obsessed with Best Practices may calcify its structure and break with any small wind." 

And in my book "Voice and Noise" of 2006 I said the following:

"Too well tuned?:  Martial arts legend Bruce Lee, whom many people regarded as immortal, died at the age of only 32 of a cerebral edema, or brain swelling, after taking some sort of aspirin. I have not the faintest idea whether that pill actually had anything to do with his death but I have frequently used (or misused) this sad death as an example of how an organism could be in such a highly tuned and perfect condition that it could not resist a small external shock. 

And I used this metaphor to explain why companies nowadays, pressured by the stock market’s expectations for the next quarterly results; the latest theories in corporate finance as to how squeeze out the last drop in results; and, perhaps, even some bit of creative accounting, might be so well-tuned (no little reserve fat left) that they would not be able to withstand any minor recession.

And here other two of my early warnings on fragility

In 1999 in a Op-Ed in I wrote: “The possible Big Bang that scares me the most is the one that could happen the day those genius bank regulators in Basel, playing Gods, manage to introduce a systemic error in the financial system, which will cause the collapse of our banks”

January 2003 in FT I wrote: “Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic error to be propagated at modern speeds”

November 2004 in FT I wrote: “Our bank supervisors in Basel are unwittingly controlling the capital flows in the world. How many Basel propositions will it take before they start realizing the damage they are doing, by favoring so much bank lending to the public sector?”

PS. Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "Antifragile" 2012, please stop referring to the last financial crisis as a “Black Swan”… it was a perfectly predictable manmade event.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

My proposal for this Earth Day 2015.

Stop using purposeless, dangerous and silly credit-risk weighted equity requirements for banks, those which allow banks to earn higher risk adjusted returns on equity when lending to those perceived as safe than when lending to "the risky".

Purposeless: because major bank crises never ever result from excessive exposures to what is perceived as “risky” but always from excessive exposures to what was erroneously perceived as “absolutely safe”. 

Dangerous: because that completely distorts the allocation of bank credit to the real economy.

Silly: because why on earth should we taxpayers lend our support to banks if their only goal is to act as safe mattresses to stash away money in. Better to build a super-safe storage facility then.

Begin using more purposeful potential of planet-earth sustainability, job generation and poverty reduction weighted equity requirements for banks.

That way our banks will earn their highest risk adjusted returns on their equity when financing what is deemed useful for the society.

That way it makes sense for us taxpayers to lend our banks the support they need, in order for these to take the astute risks we need for the world to move forward in a sustainable way generating jobs and poverty reduction.

Who shall you tell about this proposal? All bank regulators starting by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board; and to multinational entities such as the UN, IMF, and World Bank.

If they do not listen to you, at least force them to try to justify why they are supporting current credit-risk weighted equity requirements. These only impede the access to bank credit of "the risky", thereby killing opportunities and increasing inequalities.