You are right, according to Taleb, ‘08 crash was not a Black Swan but a Gray Swan, because it could be partially foreseen due to the huge risks being assumed by agencies such as Fannie and Freddie….

Here’s more:

“The Black Swan is a matter of perspective. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days – every day lulling it more and more into the feeling that the human feeders are acting in its best interest. Except that on the 1,001st day, the butcher shows up and there is a surprise. The surprise is for the turkey, not the butcher. Anyone who knows anything about the history of banking (or remembers the 1982 Latin American debt crisis or the 1990s savings and loan collapse) will tell you that the subprime crisis was so bound to happen. Banks are exposed to such blowups. Bankers have been the turkey, historically.”

“So I call these crises “gray swans.” I’ve been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile”

I would be curious to know if any of the commentators here have read Taleb’s books.

Real Estate has always been cyclical, as everybody knows. A house in Riverside, Ca. depreciates and the system collapses — there was no model and there was no blackbird.

Wage earners do not get a raise in 40 years while the world’s players hybridize $. Nothing is new. We get the same people who done it, possibly trying to undone it by giving money to each other. Nothing new. Wall Street should’ve left a little meat on the bone.

Are we going to break through 900-915 resistance zone in SPX??

99.85% chance of default??!!?? Did they really believe that crap? There’s NO TRADER in the world that would say ANYTHING is 99.85% certain….Amazing.