Black Swan' Author Taleb: Stimulus Made Economic Crisis Worse

That's the argument Taleb is making: that Buffett's success is weaker evidence for the expected return of his investment strategy than Soros's success is for his.

Taleb is correct. If you think he's wrong, you don't understand his argument.

Now, you (and Buffett and Munger) argue that there's an additional reason to believe that Buffett's strategy is a good one: because fewer decisions means that each decision will be smarter. Well, you could be right. Historically, though, human beings are pretty bad at distinguishing good investment strategies from bad ones by logically analyzing their premises. So the statistical evidence Taleb is discussing counts for more, in my book.

This is what makes this not Hacker News, in my opinion.

For instance, I knew in late 2000 or early 2001 that there would be a housing boom, a housing bubble, and a banking crisis when it burst. I was a slacker so it wasn't until 2003-2004 that I started putting money behind this scenario and I profited on the way up and on the way down. (I was way too conservative in retrospect.)

I applied economic principles (and not my own genius, I just knew who to read) with real money and profited greatly as history unfolded as predicted.

The school of economics that told me about this upcomming bubble and predicted it using the same theories they have used for nearly 100 years is the Austrian School, and you can learn more about them at http://mises.org.

I know much of what is presented in mainstream media, the NYT and in many college courses seems complicated to the point of uselessness, and certainly we had Bernanke and Greenspan both claiming there was no housing bubble, even when it was well on its way in 2006-2007.

It is not that economics is so very complicated, it is that these people have a vested interest in pretending like economics is unpredictable. Their interest is in unlimited government spending, and so they constantly talk about deflation (never a real fear) to justify an inflationary policy which is also known as "letting the government spend whatever they wish to buy votes and gain power."

Of course you doubt that an "unfettered" free market economy can deliver what is promised because you've never seen one, and instead all your life you've seen government interventions result in disaster, and then said disaster being blamed on "free market principles". Like california, which banned the generation and sale of electricity in the state blaming "deregulation" for the energy crisis. Complete with well orchestrated ENRON show trial.

It is not ignorance that causes these suboptimal decisions, it is poltiicians putting one over on you.

FWIW, the Austrian Schools predictions go back many years, including accurately predicting the great depression, the fall of communism-- not just that it would fall, but how exactly it would fall and why-- 70 years in advance, etc.

I believe the ability to make predictions is the mark of a science.

I shouldn't care that most people buy the government nonsense that economics is "just too complicated"... because I am able to profit from the ability to make these predictions.

But I see so many lives destroyed by this, and needlessly, deliberately, by people who are either extremely ignorant, or dishonest, that it drives me up the wall. (And so I post here, knowing that I risk being downvoted into oblivion, not for failing to provide a wealth of information or a relevant perspective, but for not goosestepping along with the party line.)

As long as you believe it is impossible, you won't hold them accountable when they cause disaster.

I can predict the next two bubbles... they are already well under way. The bond market bubble is the next one to pop. I expect we'll have a crisis in some form before the end of 2012, though timing is hard to predict. The question is, how are they going to inflate their way out of that one-- because the prime candidate for the crisis is a failed bond auction. (The fed appears to be printing money and buying at its own treasury auctions already to keep them from failing... this is hidden, but the clues are there, and as a result, buyers are getting wary...who knows when they will be spooked.)

AT some point after that the next bubble- the bubble in the value of the US dollar, will burst. We'll have hyperinflation, most likely, unless our government takes as sharp turn towards responsibility.... but how long that takes to play out is unclear. What is clear is that we have benefited from exporting our inflation for the past 70+ years, under Bretton Woods and other agreements, and this was viable so long as we were a major exporter, and our government was solvent. But the soverign debt crisis sweeping europe right now is hitting countries whose (real) debt to GDP ratio is similar to ours or lower--- and our debt is growing at an unprecedented clip.

It is not hard to make predictions, even with some understanding of the timing.

Economics works. The problem is what is passed off as "economics" in popular culture is, most of the time, simply political ideology pretending to be economics.

And where you have tools to predict what will happen, you may be changing the future due to the feedback loop. If somebody writes a paper demonstrating that a market will go up over a certain period, they may influence readers and cause the market to go up sooner.

Soros discusses this feedback loop at length in _ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means_, which is a book about his philosophy dressed up to sell copies in the wake of the crisis.

The issue of scientific approaches to testing economic theories is a major fault-line within economics.

    Me, I doubt that the unfettered free market economy
    can deliver what is promised.

The alternative to a free market is the various degrees of intervention that are making it not-free. Often, this means government interference. Tariffs and other forms of pork-barreling.

It was a major achievement for humans to reach a point where we could isolate power structures from trade. We've since moved a long way from it. The free market is cheap to maintain, simple, scalable, transparent and - by definition - free of political interference. It is not a system, it is an absence of system. It doesn't make promises.

    Without better understanding, we will continue to fly
    blind, waste resources, and make sub-optimal decisions.

It's a dud goal to want to create super-hacker economists who knowingly steer the economy. The best we can do is to create simple, well-understood circumstances that everyone knows, and where everyone is subject to the same rules.

The "stimulus" destroys jobs, it is a leech on the economy.

The "stimulus" destroyed jobs, as all government spending does, and it made the economy worse.

Further, it is deficit spending that is killing us, as we are incurring unprecedented deficits.

Finally, borrowing is already becomming a problem with indications that the FED is printing money to participate in the auctions (using a major bank of convenience, of course) in order to keep auction rates low... this means that the treasury auctions have already started to fail. Further, the auctions for the last 2 years have shown a sharp shift towards shorter term notes, which means the amount that has to be rolled over at each auction is snowballing.

From the first piece: "So why do people listen to this guy? Part of it is doubtless the “famous for being famous” effect. Taleb is witty and clever, and ruthlessly promoted himself as a public figure after his trading days were over. Not a bad strat for success in the modern media culture: grab the megaphone and declare yourself a genius. Everyone wants to think they’re more of a mental bigshot than the eggheads who run things. Plus, it’s not like Jim Simons has time to write Financial Times articles. He’s too busy making money more or less proving people like Taleb wrong."