Time to Nationalize US Banking System

Nassim Taleb: Time to Nationalize US Banking System?

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/01/27/Nassim_Tale...

The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that banks should be regarded as performing a function similar to that of utility companies, and should be separated from riskier investment vehicles such as hedge funds. "Banks cannot be entrusted with risk taking," he says.

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Author Nassim Taleb and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman discuss the intricacies of the financial crisis and its far-reaching influence.

Looking forward, they offer proposals to remedy the situation and prevent it from ever recurring.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist, belletrist, and researcher only interested in one single topic, chance (particularly extreme and rare events, the "Black Swans" i.e. outliers); but it falls at the intersection of philosophy/epistemology, philosophy/ethics, mathematical sciences, social science/finance, and cognitive science. Taleb is currently a researcher at London Business School. He the Deans Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Fellow in Mathematics in Finance, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (since 1999), and research fellow, Wharton School Financial Institutions Center, and Chairman, Empirica LLC. Taleb held senior trading positions with trading houses in New York and London and operated as a floor trader before founding Empirica LLC. His degrees include an MBA from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris. He is the author of Dynamic Hedging, Fooled by Randomness, and The Black Swan.