Searching for Black Swans

How do we address the real risks in the system?

I received my initiation into the flaws of capitalism in September of 2000. In July of that year, our Silicon Valley software company went public, raising $60 million on NASDAQ. In August, I turned 30 and experienced my second full burnout. And in September, the market crashed, taking our company’s valuation down with it. In the space of a month, we went from a $400 million market cap to less than 10% of that. This was a profitable company, with blue chip customers, which was suddenly trading for less than half the value of our cash on hand.

The market giveth, and the market taketh away.

The dot com bubble had lifted our company to an irrationally high valuation. And when the bubble popped, the correction was equally irrational.

This pattern repeated itself in 2008, when the housing bubble popped. But this time, the bubble was much larger, and it nearly took the world’s financial system down with it.

I’m married to a remarkably accurate empath, and for the last ten years Nicole has kept saying the same thing.

“Things are going well, but the herd is scared. Deep down, people know that something’s not right. Something feels unstable, like an earthquake that’s about to happen. But no one understands what the real danger is, or what to do about it.”

Or as Louis CK put it, “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”

Reading Ben Hunt’s brilliant essay on systemic risk brought this back to mind.

“I feel as strongly as I did in 2008 that because tens of trillions of dollars and thousands of financial careers are predicated on the systemic risk not happening, it is very hard to ‘see’ the true enemy and even harder to act proactively to protect yourself. I’ll go farther than that. I think that if you’re in the belly of the beast it’s probably impossible — and almost certainly it’s irrational — to act proactively on what I’m writing about. Which is maybe the biggest problem that the world has right now, that the people who are most aware of the true enemy to the global economic system find themselves in a position where it is career suicide to do anything about it.”

Capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful force. It has pulled billions of people out of poverty. It has created astonishing levels of prosperity. It has knitted the world into a shared, global society.

Because of it, America has become a country where we now drive to our protests.

But there is something unstable at its core.

When the 2000 bubble popped, $5 trillion of assets were lost. In 2008, that number rose to $17 trillion. How much is at risk of evaporating now? If we’ve seen a Baby Bear crash and a Mama Bear crash, is Papa Bear coming? If so, when? And what can we do about it?

These questions are very difficult to look at honestly. Our brains tend to either ignore all systemic risks (“black swans? I don’t see any black swans!”) or fall into conspiracy theories, where we start seeing catastrophes everywhere (“everyone’s out to get you!”). Existential fears cause our minds to drop into all or nothing thinking. Either nothing is wrong, and you’re a fool if you worry, or everything is wrong, and you’re a fool if you don’t.

Plus, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The deeper problem is that it’s hard to see any realistic alternative. Trying to fight against capitalism is suicidal, either as individuals or as a society. But turning a blind eye is dangerous as well. We’re not going to get rid of capitalism. But we can’t fully trust it, either.

This is the dilemma that Ben is pointing out.

So what’s the third choice?

I believe that the Noble Quest of our day is to upgrade capitalism. We need to find a way to keep its strengths while fixing its challenges.

How do we do that?

That is what these essays are going to start to explore. Please add your voice to this conversation, either by sending your thoughts to me, or by contributing to the comments below.