Nassim Nicholas Tale discusses risks facing financial markets with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker at the SALT Conference in Las Vegas on “Bloomberg Markets: The Close.”
Taleb Says Fed Should Do ‘Minimum Harm’ and Expresses His Concerns About Deficits
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Transcript
If this is part of a bigger conversation about your capitalism as you know Ray Dalio the founder and chairman of Bridgewater Associates has ignited a debate over the state of American capitalism. He says there's something wrong with it. What do you say.
I like Ray as a person. I like him personally but I think this point of view is profoundly mistaken because it's not capitalism that's wrong. It's absence of skin in the game. That is wrong. Absent yes going back to risk taking going back to risk taking. Absence of accountability. You have people making decisions that harm others without being harmed. That's not capitalism that's corporatists. Who are we talking about. What I would say is the structure that we have today Israel has skin in the game. Gray hat's kind of game was his fun. But he doesn't really protect to society where we have centralization of people in Washington making decisions like Alan Greenspan that affect this whole country. And when people you know are harmed they don't pay the price. Well that that one person is Jay Powell now the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yes. But he's more responsible OK because he he understands the job of the Federal Reserve should be minimum harm not policies that may entail side effects more generally. Jay Powell gets that better than Alan Greenspan. He gets a lot better but of course he's not the great Volcker Volcker. OK. Not yet. OK. Hasn't Sean a swan. No let's go back to the core problem is you want to live in a society that is decentralized enough that people who make a mistake are also harmed by their sit by their mistake not just inflict harm on other bailed out. What happened is we have evolved into thanks to a large state to a situation of corporatism those close to the state are bailed out It's crony capitalism. That's not capitalism crony cup. How do you fix it. There are a lot of that. I wrote a whole book on it. The skin in the game. I wrote a whole book about it. Skin in the game. So for those who haven't read the book. OK. So the idea is is locally. First of all the shameful to make a recommendation without being harm. OK. If something goes wrong it forecast without having some skin in the game sense being harmed by it how you structure a society in a way to be smaller companies. Is that not what happened is the minute we decentralize be like Germany when you decentralized.
