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What A "Black Swan" Looks Like in Real Media Time
Before last Saturday, few even knew where Cyprus was located. Then, courtesy of the most epically bungled up "bail-out in" attempt in the history of the Troika, Cyprus became the only thing everyone talked about: the definition of a black swan. How did this transformation from an ugly island duckling to a glorious black swan look like from the perspective of the media? The following chart courtesy of Bloomberg's Michael McDonough, which shows the instances of mentions of the words "Apple", "Germany" and "Cyprus" across newswires, shows the answer which not surprisingly even looks like a swan.
h/t @M_McDonough
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Apple? Never heard of it
Just buy its stock with both hands. Can't lose!
But I spent all my money on Cyprus Sovereign Bonds...should I be worried?
Google Trends: Cyprus banks
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Cyprus%20banks&cmpt=q
Its an ugly duckling not a black swan.
I'd disagree, but I don't want to cross you.
To be a Black Swan the event needs to have major consequences, in addition to being unforseen, and then afterwards seen.
What are the major consequences, again?
The fact that "deposit haircut" has now entered the public psyche.
pods
I am no expert on Taleb's idea, but I do remember from the book that there are three requirements. I do see how those claiming to be "experts" are going to give a simplistic explanation, and how the recent events in Cyprus could not have been forseen by those that had money on deposit (or they would have withdrawn the money), but the effect is only significant, so far, for those few individuals losing money. Thus, it is not a black swan for me, or for most people.
Unless, of course, the real black swan is not the loss of capital, but something yet unseen. The loss of confidence, maybe?
Let's see that chart in a month adding the term, "bank run."
My read of Taleb is that the black swan can remain "unseen" even after it strikes (the reference to the war in Lebanon in his first chapters). The thing that makes it a black swan, apart from it seemingly coming out of nowhere, is that it alters the norm of "mediocristan" in defiance of expectations that its effects are "transient".
The "black swan" that manifested itself in 2008 hasn't gone away, despite the unending meme that it is a past event. Same was true of the stock market crash of '29 - many thought it was all over within 2-3 years - reality is that the worst years of the depression were '37, '38 and '39 and the whole global depression wasn't "reset" until carnal instincts took us through WWII.
Regardless of how it will fall in the timeline, it is sickening to watch Brussels and Germany celebrate the broad wipeout of depositors, the decimation of the Cypriot economy, and liquidation of a bulk of the banking sector simply so those insane fascists can claim the EU is intact.
Sickening. This is what 21st century fascism looks like.
I am not trying to say it meets Taleb's defintion (havent read it) but to me, the idea of depositors having to submit to part of their money being extracted is about the dumbest and earth shattering mental concept that could be introduced, and on purpose.
A thought like that can enter your mind and change your whole paradigm. Granted, deposits are actually the property of the bank, but if it enters the mindset that money in the bank is not money in the bank I do not see how it stays together. Everything from credit funny money to Ben's 85 billion a month come crashing down if the actual currency has to be increased to match a new paradigm of bank of the mattress. No way they can play around with printing if they actually have to print.
The whole system comes crashing down if that manifests.
pods
Is it the loss of property rights , think Magna Carta, or just stupid people who left their money in insolvent banks who should be glad they're not losing it all.
+1 with a golf clap.
looks more like an anal probe than a swan to me.
You lookin down at yer member, or the chart..? :D
Remember the ugly duckling grew up to be a swan. This is a black swan in waiting.
google trends : bank run
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bank%20run&cmpt=q
Before maybe a month ago, I hadn't heard of Cyprus.
Now, I'm looking to set up Dunkin' Donuts, Re/Max, Cold Stone Creamery, Bath & Bodyworks, Harley Davidson & Carl's Jr. franchises there. Wish me luck!
We already have Cold Stone Creamery and Harley Davidson here. They were both too expensive for the average Cypriot. Now they are completely out of reach. I imagine the HD dealership, which is right next to the Porsche dealership, will be closing quite soon.
Plenty of Harley dealers shuttered in the USA recently as well. Not enough 1%ers to keep them in business I guess.
I can only hope. Like the looks of HD, but just HATE their noise. Obnoxious and offensive. Prefer BMW bikes.
I really had heard of Cypress. I was just playing the role of "ignoramus Americanus," a species that people the world over know all too well.
I'm not bragging, as it isn't much of a point of pride, unless one is being judged against the relative effluent regularly produced by the U.S. Public School System.
what? never heard of the Island of Love? the birthplace of Aphrodite, aka Venus? no wonder US spelling checkers corrected for a week Cyprus to Cypress
meanwhile don't forget that Cyprus has quite a food culture that even Brits were not able to spoil too much, so I presume that you are ill adviced to try to set up a Dunkin' Donuts franchise there
and on the island you also find lots of restaurants that cater to the British tourists with their favourite fare: Indian cuisine
"The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people: white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue (these are people of modest being) – continue to elect these rich douchebags who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you – they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all – at all – at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care."
Can you repeat that please?... I was distracted...
"what? never heard of the Island of Love?"
I've heard of the Island of Lesbos... which I'm fine with as long as I can watch.
"...Cyprus has quite a food culture that even Brits were not able to spoil too much..."
The cure for all the finer things in life: Advertising - because it works (just check American diet, so called).
Spell check, ill advised rather than ill adviced? I guess either could be correct.
If the Russian Mafia had used the same banks as the Mexican Drug Cartels, HSBC and Wachovia, they wouldn't have this problem.
"Just buy its stock with both hands. Can't lose!" Is that you Cramer?
SADLY, BIG BIM IS TRYING TO PULL IT OUT OF HIS ASS WITH BOTH HANDS...
Fucking banksters and MSM have their cans of Krylon Flat white for this bird and whatever paint is leftover they are saving for the gold and silver tapes.
Cyprus may not be the black swan that takes us over the cliff, but the way the Troika
has handled it so far, just released a large flock of them just over the horizon.
BTFD...
Bankers Try Fucking Depositors ?
Banks To Fail Disastrously.
Best To Flee Defensively.
Better Try Finding Doubloons.
Bungling Trioka Found Dead
Doubloons? They're going after them too
Dutch Bank ABN Amro has sent a letter to clients this weekend informing them that they will halt extradition and physical delivery of their clients’ gold holdings effective April 1st!
http://www.silverdoctors.com/dutch-bank-abn-amro-halts-physical-gold-delivery/
I thought Cyprus was fixed and we could again go back to shoveling coal into the boilers? Just some ice on the deck, no worries.
pods
Captain says no worry, the ship has 17 compartments, and the first class entertaining rooms are fun. don't worry until the band stops playing
ok, I'll repeat it again: no european would ever say "this is fixed, now". It's an US habit of "fixing" a crisis. we tend to "manage" them - up to the point that there are people still working on tax-payer money who are "managing" issues long dead
deleted
Ghordius,
Victor the Cleaner writes/tweets that the Euro has the Dollar 'cornered'..........do you agree with this?
Keep shovelling anyway. Maybe we can reach shore before we slip below the waves.
Black swan...it's what's for dinner.
(could I get that with a side of horse and some earless rabbit?...)
does it go better with taters and corn or cole slaw and baked beans?
I have heard the Escolar sushi is all the rage these days.
pods
Only for the anal oozing crowd.
Bail out = Banksters set free to plunder and rob again
Cyprus was a black swan, and that's why the stock market was flat last week. The black swan has now passed, and stawks can now go to infinity.
I hope that we'll be able to follow the medical examiners in Belgium and Cyprus.
It'll be fun to do this analysis with other terms in the future, like "Bernanke kicked in the nuts repeatedly by angry mob".
Too many people expect the Russian mafia to exact revenge in the coming days, but I really don't see any of this happening.
Why? Because the IMF and ECB are the mafia themselves, so there is no way that they would have tried to screw one of their own. In other words, I don't doubt for a second that some backroom deal was made with them.
Any Russian mafioso who is losing money today from the Cyprus "deal" will be compensated in full with some of the bailout money.
The only way I will be proven wrong on this is if a single European bankster suddenly dies of a suspicious "accident" in the coming days. I won't hold my breath, however.
It's all business as usual for those global mobsters.
I kick him on a daily basis.
I want a birthday bash set up for TD where we all get to show up and watch Pinatas in the likeness of Bernanke, Krugman, etc. being bashed with a bat; releasing a torrent of gold and silver coins when finally demolished. Oh the fun that would be! Profitable too!
When Dostoevksy's Idiot, Andrew Cuomo, used the word "confiscation" while discuccing gun control alternatives, it fed fuel to the fire and whoosh, all the ammo, magazines and rifles suddenly dissappeard. In the entire country. It was a run on arms.
When the European Technocrats mentioned a levy on bank deposits ... just tremors.
They are both confiscation. The current BAD BANK structure is evaporating (poof!) aproximately 11bn Euro, back of envelope (assuming a 70/30 split of small to large accounts off of 76bn in deposits which gives figures simlilar to what Cyprus looked to raise last week by the levy, now applying 30% haircut to the 30% of large accounts).
It's confiscation WITHOUT any ratification by parliament, since it's a wind down of a failed bank.
It still leaves Cyprus bank sector at 3.5 + times GDP, and saddled with a 9bn ELA liability to the ECB, or 50% of GDP. The numbers still do not work.Structurally, the insolvent bank(s) will remain insolvent.
But the seed of CONFISCATION is now sown across the EU.Green shoots of confiscation.
No one saw the financial crisis coming. No one saw sub prime. No one saw the Tech Bubble ... No one saw CONFISCATION? Is this over? What do you think?
"No one saw CONFISCATION?"
Wrong! Walyat saw it coming like he has seen every damn thing coming since about 2007. 100% right the whole time. A genius. "Well over a year ago I attempted to map out how euro-zone financial armageddon might play out for the UK that would start with a Bank Holiday that would keep getting extended until the Government had worked out the mechanisms for stealing your savings. The big difference between the UK and euro-zone members is that the UK can and would print an unlimited amount of currency to prevent nominal loss to depositors Cyprus style, the consequences of which would be a collapse in sterling and resulting very high inflation whereas that option has not been available to the likes of Cyprus by virtue of having the Euro so it is forced to outright steal depositor funds."
03 Dec 2011 - How to Protect Your Bank Deposits, Savings From Euro-zone Collapse Financial Armageddon
How is this not theft? I can understand communist dictator nationalizing assets but come on how can the free world just go on ho-hum? Fucking criminal.
What is this 'free world' you speak of?
Here is a comment made by a friend of mine as we were emailing about this. I think his is an interesting position. People in the third world have been slaves to the system forever. Now that the enslavement is spreading... now we show concern. It didn't seem to bother us much when we benefited from the arrangement. His take:
"Yes, we are slaves of the more powerful. But that has always been the case. The people at the bottom in all the third world and developing countries in the world have always been slaves. I find the circumstance of the newly converted to the cause of slavery among the class of people lucky enough to have excess capital to worry about tax shelters less than sincere and unsympathetic".
If he was aware that a less-enslaved existence was available to him, why did he stay put? Does he like his plight?
He's here. He's simply awake. Our enslavement isn't a recent occurance. It's merely increasinly recognizable to us, where as the third world have lived it forever. His take, anyway... though I suppose I agree.
that is cool atht your friend is ready for slavery. If that works for him, great. I come from a long line of European Barbarians and Savages who looted Rome repeatedly. Slavery doesn't work for me.
I don't know you, so I don't want to make any assumptions... but I'm guessing you are already a slave. When we plug into the system that's what we become. It's presented to us differently. We have limitless opportunity to "succeed"... which is translated to mean, "buy a nice home, manage a big mortgage, buy/finance a couple of disposable cars, buy processed food-like things to eat each day, put excess earning into your 401k (which will be confiscated), or allow inflation to steak it first, finance a college degree (indentured servitude), consume, consume, consume... stuff that was almost certainly produced by slave labor".
None of this looked so bad on the way up. Who really cares if my iPad was assembled in China, or if I don't really own the home that I claim to own, or anything else really... things were "OK". But now the music is ending and there are only a handful of chairs and 10 times the number of people trying to grab one. The slavery we didn't call slavery and didn't feel like slavery is going to be replaced by something else.
Personally, my mental list of Project Mayhem "initiatives" has been growing daily.
This involves an entire anarchistic supply chain.
cause it's not "free".
What...not a single mention of the dysfunctional US Senate's passed "budget"...which includes $1 trillion moar in taxes?
Future Flash...BlackRock proposes legislation requiring all US workers to be paid in shares of $GE...government officials still working on conversion rate citing absence of information on BlackRock's planned executive pay raises for 2013.
We all live in a cosmic bunny hole, a cosmic bunny hole, a cosmic bunny hole.
+1 for Yellow Submarine improv...
We just need a little more on the open politician killing side of it, since i think a few more will be " suicided ", then on to the next phase.
C'mon, getting boring already.
The chart looks like the start of the game "Hang Man" to me...
Hang Man !
Japan is the Black Swan. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time is running out.
Negatory. If you can see it coming, it ain't a Black Swan.
The drummers are drumming, and the ladies have their knitting needles out...
Just waiting for the carts to show up.
Black Swan?! What? the same media, (AP) "Stock Rise after Cyprus Deal, S&P near record" comical.
"disconnect" doesn't adequately discribe the phenominon.
Isn't this lovely. Stocks are making new highs as the morons in stocks fail to realize that the eurozone is still faultering 3 years after the crisis began in greece. Watch out when people finally figure out there is an end game to all of this.
But they don't see that, because it's not part of the narrative they feed on. Cyprus falls apart and what happens - funds are withdrawn from that hole and become available to go elsewhere. And thus the ramp. No different than QE when you think about it.
What stocks don't understand is that credit can be destroyed. Vaporized into nothingness, and 95% of all money is credit.
If you enlarge to an hourly chart, there is a red line that spikes for 'Porn' at 2pm UK time. I wonder why!
not a black swan? how soon we forget, the effects of Bear Stearns going down weren't felt for months, in fact stock markets rose.
Capitol flight from southern europe, whats the effect of say a bank run in Spain? how do you spell cascade?
"Economy Dream Team" who the fuck came up with that idea. Their dreaming all right.
your right, this is just a little dark duckling, the big japanese swan is the dancer to watch, perhaps too anticipated to be a suprise....ah but what a splash she'll make, and I don't think markets have priced in that tsunami yet
Quack effing QUACK!!
Looks like an EKG of a heart attack.
I don't know if you would call it a Black Swan event. Black Swan, after all, is simply a probability curve, and Taleb's point was that the endpoints of the probability curve come at you at a much more furious pace than that pleasantly slopping probability curve allows for.
Rather, the "government without democratic consent seizes private assets" event was just revealed to be closer to the center of probability. Much closer. Dam near at the top of the menu, in fact. GM bondholder seizer should have warned everyone already, but now the mask is off.
That looks more like "Anthropogenic Global Warming" to me. At least, that is what the MSM says.
Japn is OK. They hve just found vast deposits of rare earth metals in mud at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.
See today's Daily Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
This is getting interesting.
Sure, it's just one week, but the rig count may be indicative of some upset in oil production. It may be a black swan for those who do not pay attention. It's not Cyprus or Italy or Spain, it will be something that puts the Fed in a position where damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
http://www.wtrg.com/rotaryrigs.html
Another manufactured crisis to justify theft.
I'm watching real estate values there.In the next year or two it might be a good place to invest in a little land or something else with a few trustworthy partners.Near a low in prices I can see fear overwhelming people just before a big gas play and port facilities get built.Just watching for some downturn for now.
Transmit that to Vladimir.
where is "Gold" cover story count line
The precedent is now set. For those with too much cash, it's going to be really difficult to open as many small balance accounts as needed given the consolidated in the "financial services" industry.