Nassim Taleb says "The Federal Reserve Will Be Gone In 25 Years," Ridicules Geithner Publicly And Accuses Krugman Of 'Stealing Assets From Your Grandchildren' (VIDEO)

Aug 17, 2011 at 10:36 PM
DailyBail in Federal Bankruptcy, ben bernanke, bernanke, fed, federal debt, federal deficit, federal reserve, federal reserve, financial crisis, financial regulation, geithner, nassim taleb, nassim taleb, nassim taleb video, paul kkrugman, tim geithner

Originally published in October 2010.

Runs 1 minute.  The focus of this first video is Paul Krugman.

• Update:  Taleb said today that investors should sue the Nobel Prize for creating the financial crisis (Bloomberg)

We love how Taleb gets personal with his attacks.  It's obvious that he does not like Geithner, Bernanke and Krugman.  Just last week he told Reuters that he walked out of a meeting with Geithner and wouldn't shake his hand.

A little context -- this was recorded last Friday at the Washington Ideas Forum.  The humor is that the previous speaker, on the same stage and to the same audience, was Tim Geithner, spreading TARP bailout propaganda and lies.  Geithner finishes, and out walks Taleb who says squarely -- I'm paraphrasing:

• "Don't listen to Geithner.  He's a corrupt, failed regulator."

Beautiful.

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Source:  Huffington Post

Deficits "will break the Fed" and it will be replaced, he predicted.

• "The Romans had a saying," Taleb added: "The grandchildren should not bear the debt of the grandparents."

That debt is made more dangerous, Taleb said, by the increasingly complexities of the financial system, a problem that he said has not been ameliorated during the last three years. "Debt and complexity are not friends," he said, because "complexity causes unpredictability," and heavy debt burdens mean one false move, whether by an individual actor or a system, could spell disaster.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a popular columnist for The New York Times, "doesn't understand" the economic situation the U.S. finds itself in, Taleb claimed, nor do most economists.

Because of the significant rise in debt, within 25 years "anything fragile will break," Taleb said. That includes the Fed, he argued, because the Fed "fragilized this country."

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Taleb says the Fed will eventually fail...

This is the full discussion, inlcuding Geithner, FED and other comments.

Source:  The Atlantic

Taleb explained his simple metric for judging whose economic opinions are worth his time:

• "Did someone predict the crisis before it happened? ... If the answer is no, I don't want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming, then I want to hear what they have to say."

• "You have a million people on this planet who call themselves economists," Taleb said. "How many people understood the risks of the system [before the crisis]? ... Paul Krugman was not one of them."

Taleb took issue with Krugman's support of deficit spending.

• "This transformation of private debt, with all the moral hazard it entails, into public debt is, number one, from a risk standpoint, bad," he said.  "And from an ethical standpoint, I find it immoral.  The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents."

Asked where the economy would be in 25 years, Taleb gave the vague response that:

• "...everything fragile will break."  Oh, and that the Fed won't exist anymore.  It will be replaced by something "I think more organic and that makes more sense."

 

 

Further reading...

 

Taleb Says He Wouldn't Shake Geithner's Hand, Calls Bernanke "A True Charlatan," Blames Nobel Prize For Rewarding Bad Economists

 

Transparency at the FED -- Bailout Farce

 

WHAT WOULD KRUGMAN SAY ABOUT THIS?

 

Geithner: "I Never Had A Real Job"

 

 

 

 

Slideshow - Time Magazine Looks Inside the Private Offices of Fed Chairman Bernanke

Article originally appeared on The Daily Bail (http://dailybail.com/).