{"id":51234,"date":"2020-02-19T19:27:26","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T00:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51234"},"modified":"2020-02-19T19:27:30","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T00:27:30","slug":"the-white-swans-of-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51234","title":{"rendered":"The White Swans of 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"roubini137_Mikhail<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The White Swans of 2020<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Financial markets remain blissfully in denial of the many predictable global crises that could come to a head this year, particularly in the months before the US presidential election. In addition to the increasingly obvious risks associated with climate change, at least four countries want to destabilize the US from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEW YORK \u2013 In my 2010 book, Crisis Economics<\/em><\/a>, I defined financial crises not as the \u201cblack swan\u201d events that Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>described in his eponymous bestseller<\/a>, but as \u201cwhite swans.\u201d According to Taleb, black swans are events that emerge unpredictably, like a tornado, from a fat-tailed statistical distribution. But I argued that financial crises, at least, are more like hurricanes: they are the predictable result of built-up economic and financial vulnerabilities and policy mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are times when we should expect the system to reach a tipping point \u2013 the \u201cMinsky Moment\u201d \u2013 when a boom and a bubble turn into a crash and a bust. Such events are not about the \u201cunknown unknowns,\u201d but rather the \u201cknown unknowns.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the usual economic and policy risks that most financial analysts worry about, a number of potentially seismic white swans are visible on the horizon this year. Any of them could trigger severe economic, financial, political, and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For starters, the United States is locked in an escalating strategic rivalry with at least four implicitly aligned revisionist powers: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. These countries all have an interest in challenging the US-led global order, and 2020 could be a critical year for them, owing to the US presidential election and the potential change in US global policies that could follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under President Donald Trump, the US is trying to contain or even trigger regime change in these \u00a0four countries through economic sanctions and other means. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The White Swans of 2020 Financial markets remain blissfully in denial of the many predictable global crises that could come to a head this year, particularly in the months before the US presidential election. In addition to the increasingly obvious risks associated with climate change, at least four countries want to destabilize the US from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[77,29061,1849,3018,1917,8402,29060],"class_list":["post-51234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-black-swan","tag-crisis-economics","tag-financial-markets","tag-minsky-moment","tag-nouriel-roubini","tag-project-syndicate","tag-white-swan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51235,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51234\/revisions\/51235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}