Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Charlie Rose

I watched all twenty minutes, and found them rather interesting:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9713

The points he raises about (1) deleveraging across the board, (2) banks as utilities, (3) re-inventing economics as a discipline and (4) less speculation, all seem very sensible and logical.

I found his book, Black Swan, informative and I think insightful in the section on finance. It was, however, so obtuse and repetitive that I had to do a harsh skim read through most of it.


My personal thought on the crisis, and one which I haven't seen picked up generally, is that one of the classic responses to a principal-agent problem is transparency, or more information flow.

It seems to me that with web technologies we can radically increase transparency and reduce the hazards associated with leaving our money in the hands of others.

While this is a general and fairly utopian idea, it is worth stating that the presence of professional managers of other people's money are not going away. So we have to solve this problem, or at least ameliorate it.

But we can certainly create a new sort of information infrastructure, one where by opening up all sorts of information on corporate activity to public scrutiny we can introduce greater diversity and debate in the interpretation of their actions.