1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.
Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.
In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.
************[Apr 2, 2009: The Tale of Political Influence in Changing Accounting Rules, Nassim Taleb on CNBC]
[Dec 4, 2008: Nassim Taleb on Charlie Rose]
4 comments:
It's a great list of everything we should be doing, but won't, because the oligarchs would lose out. By the way, you will find resistance among the general population to most of these precepts, in particular 7 through 9. A lot of people would agree that everyone needs to have "skin in the game" (be invested in our industrial infrastructure) to keep society running.
Max,
unfortunately the rules are not made for the general population
almost all of the stuff is common sense
what really stinks is all the solutions pretty much just set us up back to where we were before.
in fact JPM, BAC, WFC are even more too big to fail
anyhow I've given up
Just going to try to make my few bucks while handing it off to govt to subsidize those who have all the bucks
the populace doesnt seem to care so as long as their 401ks can pop 8% annualized in between the 50% drops they are cool with it.
I agree with Max. Nearly the entire system is based on opposing these principles. A very small % of wall street has self-merit. It's been almost entirely a ponzi scheme for a long time, and so an application of these principles would be self-destructive. Our economic system suffers from a cancer built on leverage, fraud, and false truisms, a cancer so far gone that any form of chemotherapy would kill the body. Better to pretend it isn't there than to fight it at this point.
So when is the breaking point? When will the next blow of reality hit? We're doing the exact same nonsense japan did only this time its at a larger scale. I expect us to be generally flat over the next ten years, w/ 2 month long alternate bull and bear markets.
This list is basically closing the barn door after the horse is gone.
What the system needs is better accounting, better governance, and better transparency.
The system does not need a list of prescriptive rules
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