The white swan harbingers of global economic crisis are already here | Nouriel Roubini

Seismic risks for the global system are growing, not least worsening US geopolitical rivalries, climate change and now the coronavirus outbreak

In my 2010 book, Crisis Economics, I defined financial crises not as the "black swan" events that Nassim Nicholas Taleb described in his eponymous bestseller but as "white swans". 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 builtup economic and financial vulnerabilities and policy mistakes.

There are times when we should expect the system to reach a tipping point - the "Minsky Moment" - when a boom and a bubble turn into a crash and a bust. Such events are not about the "unknown unknowns" but rather the "known unknowns".

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