When Nicholas Taleb penned his passionate polemic about the inability of financial markets to allow for unanticipated and rare events ("black swans"), he did us all a great service in highlighting the narrow-mindedness that can have dire consequences. Then the pendulum swung too far. Instead of complacency about rare, destabilizing events, the markets, the media and the politicians developed a fixation: Find the next black swan. That has led to a belief that any sign of stability, any indication that the worst may have passed is simply a false dawn. Luckily, that skittishness has passed. – Reuters
Dominant Social Theme: The Black Swan has flown. Its glory is gone.
Free-Market Analysis: Black Swan. Being Austrian, we never believed in it to begin with. There are business cycles, triggered by excessive money printing – and these cycles predictably trigger black swan events.
Which means, really, there are no black swans.