I understand what you mean but really I don't think it comes even close for the average person. Maybe for some traders it could be. I would not doubt there are some people that are now filling out job apps that thought this was going to be a good year this day last week. Otherwise for the rest of the population it was no more than a headline on the TV/Radio/net etc..... My mother in law asked me about it on mothers day during dinner. I tired to explain it was not one thing but many things coming together all at once and that I did not (and still do not) think it was someone who fat-fingered a trade. I read both of the books and my impression is that a black swan is more in tune to having the port of houston, LA, SF, Newark, Tacoma, Miami, Shanghai, Singapore,HK, and a few others shut down in some serious all at once event. As someone that did international trade before trading full time I don't think it would be that hard to have five or six containers full of high explosives with nasty stuff with it to all go off within an hour of each other in each port and a window of two hours would easily be available as I understand it to make it all happen. shutting down trade would cripple the world economy when we really don't need another "event" much less one that could take years to recover from and cause massive starvation. Think of what the markets around the world would do then and they sure would not recover in 30 minutes either. Then you have a black swan....... Or as I said several times in my blog and here on ET. at some point our debt level is going to be so big that we are going to be worried that we are unable to sell more bonds and we will "need" to sell more bonds. It will be that time or the very next time that the chinese don't show up and worse, they start to sell (not even quicly) what they do hold and it drives up rates 500 bases points in one day followed by ever increasing rates until we have 1979 again only this time our debt level turns our interest payments into 50%+ of the budget. bye bye North America as the center of GDP and hello Middle Kingdom as once again the most powerful nation on earth. Maybe not a black swan for the Chinese but for America its thanksgiving and we are the turkey...
He actually had one good point: "Thanksgiving is a black swan for the turkey, but not for the butcher." So May 6th was probably a black swan for a trader who can average down up to 40 ES points but got blown out. For a longer term swing trader who was expecting a downturn (the 2 previous days were already big red) it was probably not...
Great point. Taleb is simply someone with an opinion based on limited information. His limited information afforded him his 15 minutes of fame and that is in the process of drying up. Before we had satellites foreseeing major weather cells was nearly impossible but now with this new and improving technology, we can protect human life by fore warning the public of this eminent danger. After the storm, the construction industry blooms.