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Nassim Taleb On #OccupyWallStreet And His Updated Views On The Global Banking System
There was a time when Nassim Taleb media appearances were a daily thing. Then he decided to take a sabbatical from the public's eye, and literally fell off the face of the planet. And while over the past year or so, he has gradually resurfaced, his extended discussions on various topics are still almost as rare as a double digit move in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Tonight he broke his vow of silence, and joined Bloomberg TV's in discussing the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, which he expects to devolve into class warfare, as well as his view of the global banking system. And an interesting tangential discussion to develop is his observation of applying the principles of the "Hammurabi's Code" to the banking system.
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Balanced and Fair.
http://nation.foxnews.com/john-stossel/2011/10/18/stossel-visits-wall-street-protesters
whether it's God or a bomb
it's just the same
and it's only fear under another name
A really good interview, but I don't think it is enough. There's more problems than the banking compensation problem. There's the poison food problem. There's the militarily imperialistic government problem. There's the corporations having the rights of people problem. There's the globalization and trade imbalance problem. There's the government soon forcing people to buy private insurance problem. There's monopoly problems. There's our government being bought off puppets problem. There's the large amount of people in prison and private prisons lobbying problem. There's the illegal marijauna when half the country would like it legalized problem. There's the having a private bank called the Federal Reserve problem. And my list could go on.
That long list is why OWS doesn't have a clear message. The list is so long. Our country is so broken. It has been run of, for and by the corporate elite for too long instead of the people. It is hard for me to imagine it could be fixed enough in time to stop a revolution. Time will tell.
Excellent reply. I was about to post a message with the same point. Fortunately I scanned down the existing messages and saw yours.
On the one side the USSA and world have dozens of extremely serious systemic problems. On the other side of ALL of these are the financial elitist controlled governments, central banks, large financial corporations, and most other large corporations.
Therefore, any focus on "the problem" will necessarily be a very limited focus on a small part of the whole problem, and thereby not entirely satisfactory. What we should all be able to agree upon, however, is that elitism must go, authoritarianism must go, fiat must go, fractional reserve must go. This in turn can be reduced to one demand for individual liberty. Reject (or punish) all forms of involuntary interactions, and reject all forms of justification based upon fictitious entities (like government, corporations, etc).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMiMAFpK-W0&feature=related
Re: US Debt Crisis - 2012 is only for America
.
New post
http://thethoughtfultrader.blogspot.com/2011/10/sellers-beware.html
www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_DwZfyXAXI#t=2m08s
"I almost had him, you stuttering prick ya!"
NNT is a stuttering prick, I have no ida why anyone takes this guy (who essentially needs hundreds of pages to tell us that 'shit happens') so seriously.
With all respect for Nassim Taleb, I don't quite agree with him. The bankers themselves didn't cause the crisis. The Fed with it's monetary policy and Congress with it's spending habits and Whitehouse with it's stupid geopolitics caused it. The bankers build a house that collapsed and should be held resposible but it was political class that ordered the house and designed it. And banking cartel is not the only one draining wealth from citizens trapped in debt prison. Cutting bonuses for banksters won't solve the problem, it might at most cool down the crowd for a while. Once inflation hits the Main Street, we'll have #OccupyWallmart. what's would be Nassim's answer to that?
Oh? And who determines government policies through control of the flow of cash into its members' pockets if not 'the bankers'? And who is it that puts the politicians where they are and fails to vote them out if not 'the citizens'? Tell me, how many of those now 'occupying Wall Street' casts votes for either the Democrat or Republican shysters in the last election? Weren't these same imbecilic celebrities like Michael Moore begging the public to vote for Obama just a few years ago?
politicians let the bankers determine policies. they do it deliberately.
the banksters, for instance, are not responsible for the wars - actually wars hurt their most lucrative business to trap enemies into debt and suck their blood.
"The bankers themselves didn't cause the crisis. The Fed with it's monetary policy"
bankers = Fed
Fed has shareholders. Guess who they are. No, don't guess. Go look it up.
Class warfare? About time. The elite have been waging theirs on the serfs (in whatever form) for the longest time now. Extracting your last dollar by hook or crook is what they've been all about.
My heart doesn't bleed one drop of blood for these bastards.
First Jeremy Rifkin throws out one-God Abraham with the bath water. Now Prof. Taleb attempts to replace him with multi-god Hammurabi. If he is successful in removing the cornerstone of forgiveness from Western society, then who else can bear the burden but the facade of government not being the people (ala Karl Marx)?
I would suggest leaving forgiveness in the framework of democracy, but instead removing the auto-start function from Bloomberg videos which thankfully we have learned how to do.
http://tradewithdave.com/?p=8209
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
Sorry, but I am not a forgiving person.
As the saying goes ' no more second chances'...and they have had plenty
The vampires need their share of blood, it is irrelevant to them whether their victims are dead or alive. The vampires die if they do not get their daily dose of blood and similarly you can get rid of greedy, gambling, politician buying, too big to fail bankers (now fast approaching too big to bail) by not providing them access to your money in the form of savings and cut off all ties with them.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24581.html
Very interesting - he understands that the current system gives certain privileged groups/industries the benefits of markets, while placing the risks on others. That's not capitalism or a market-based economy.
Too bad neither major political party 'gets it' when it's so obvious to hundreds of thousands of us.
I think they may get it and still not be fixing it because they don't want to give up the big money they get from lobbyists.
The Great American Bubble Machine
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-mach...
Today the GAO is out with a new report on Fed governance--or the blatant lack thereof. Honestly, although they seem to have done their best to obfuscate the issue that they identified, only a seven-year old would miss the glaring truths: http://bit.ly/qi8dNW
“They are hijacking the American economy by saying you need us, you need to pay us bonuses. The people in the military don’t get bonuses.”
Not having been killed is a bonus for someone in the military.
“Hammurabi’s code: ‘If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, the build shall be put to death’.”
Sounds like the model we need for financial regulation.
I hate the way the term "anarchy" is tossed around (in the interview and elsewhere).
If "anarchy" means "no individual has any right or ethical justification for taking any action on behalf of a fictitious entity (government, corporation, etc) that is not ethical on behalf of the individual", then anarchy is the only ethical system whatsoever, and no legitimate objection to anarchy can be formulated.
If "anarchy" means "total chaos", then critics of "anarchy" must tell us what term means "sanity, liberty and individualism" as described above.
As it is now, the term "anarchy" is nothing more than an intellectual scam to "checkmate" any demand for individual rights, and support every form of elitist, statist, authoritarian abuse.
What really needs to happen is the abolishment of every form of "official recognition" of ALL fictions, including "government", "corporation", etc. Today, almost the entire purpose of these fictions is to justify the enslavement and abuse of the majority of mankind by a relatively small group of predators-that-be and members of the predator-class (central banks, large financial institutions, most large corporations, etc).
To survive as a species in a modern, highly technological world, humans NEED to stop being scammed by fictions. All fictions must be rejected by mankind, which simply means understanding what is fiction and what is not, and treating all fictions as fictions, not reality. How many people understand these fundamental facts:
predators DBA government
predators DBA corporations
predators DBA central banks
To be completely clear, "government", "corporation", "central bank" are all simply NAMES that predators hide behind. ALL actions are taken exclusively by individual human beings. Fictions do not exist and thus CANNOT take actions. Therefore, no fiction has ever taken an action --- only the individuals who hide behind those fictional names take actions. Therefore, when any of us consider whether actions are ethical or legitimate, we must complete ignore all fictions and evaluate the actions taken by individuals. Once we recognize that all that exists is reality, including human beings, we can see clearly by simple consistency and symmetry that no human can have any right to take actions that are not right for other humans. This utterly eliminates all the many fictions that are essentially just forms of elitism, because clearly no individual has any inherent or derivative rights that all others do not.
In other words, ANARCHY is simply fact (assuming we adopt the sane meaning for anarchy. All that exists is individual humans acting in a single universe. ALL fictions that have been created by predators over the history of mankind to scam individuals are pure, unadulterated fiat, fake, fraud, fiction, fantasy... and blatant insanity suffered by the vast majority of mankind.