Book review: Antifragile: Things that gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is unique in stimulating thought while often annoying and exasperating the reader. He is likable yet solipsistic, intelligent yet pedantic, compassionate yet abrupt. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder is the second of his books I’ve read (actually listened to the audio version), the first was The Black Swan back in 2007-08. Reviewed here, and in re-reading that review I’ll affirm my 5 star rating. Taleb’s influence was critical to my reassessment of the capital markets in 2008 and his admonitions supported some gainful personal decisions at that time.

Antifragility is defined as the quality of something to benefit from disorder. Unlike a poorly constructed UPS package of wine glasses that will shatter if disturbed, something that is antifragile will actually gain strength if disturbed. This is not to be confused with robust, which is merely something that is less likely to be damaged with disorder, ie, a well-constructed UPS package of wine glasses.  Antifragile takes it a step further to an entity that is actually improved with disorder.

Nassim Taleb says that great thinkers have only one great idea which is refined and adapted over time. Darwin had natural selection, Einstein had relativity, and presumably, Taleb includes himself with the idea he now calls antifragility.  I did mention he has an ego, right? Putting Taleb’s high self-opinion aside for a moment, I’ll grant that Antifragility as a followup to the Black Swan does deserve a place at least in the minor pantheon of cultural memes, albeit a few notches below Darwinism, but yeah.

As an example in nature, Taleb refers to the ability of any species to adapt to environmental stressors as antifragile. Antifragility is  everywhere in nature: the weak succumb while the strong survive and reproduce. Cultural examples are depicted by Adam Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand” that guides markets opaquely by rewarding beneficial actors and punishing the weak. For the record, Taleb later notes that the right-wing corporatist understanding of Adam Smith is incorrect and Smith never used the word “capitalist”, but that is another issue.

Platonic, or top-down, management is differentiated from bottom-up, or empiric, reality. Plato’s idea of a philosopher-king, like a soviet style central planner who has some special understanding, does not jibe with what we observe in the world.  Rather, the world is populated with adapting individuals and evolving ideas, some of which will die off and others that will survive. Taleb extends this notion from business and banking to other fields as wide-ranging as medical care and even religion.

Upon listening to a short interview of Taleb regarding this book, I was a bit unsure if I’d agree with his assessment of health care, but having finished the book, I’ll accept that he has it mostly correct. Medicine is best when it embraces the empiric, guided by what we see that actually works….what Taleb calls the heuristic: the rule of thumb.  Treating numbers, like mildly elevated cholesterol levels or arbitrary blood pressure “abnormals” with medication can lead to iatrogenic (ie, doctor-induced) harm and needless cost. The best examples of pharmaceutical development are rare-- eg, antibiotics and vaccines-- while things like cholesterol-lowering statin medication, developed for only the worst hereditary hypercholesterolemias, are now prescribed to lower mildly elevated levels without evidence of benefit. The human body, much like capital markets, is too complex to adhere to such top-down models since such things as long term sequelae and side effects are impossible to predict a priori. The best medical practice comes from time-tested heuristics, otherwise known as rules of thumb empirically shown to be effective. All else is waste and danger.

The asymmetry of information in medical care is what renders it complex, not only the asymmetry of knowledge between doctor and patient, but also--especially-- the asymmetry of resources between corporate actors and those of us in the trenches. If Big DrugCo floods the evening news shows with advertisements for their latest wonder drug, there isn’t a whole lot that will keep that drug from making it into medicine cabinets around the country. Eventually enough patients and practitioners will succumb to the influence of the moneyed interests. Restless Leg Syndrome has no less than six FDA-approved remedies.

Taleb was an options trader back in the 1980’s, buying mostly out-of-the-money puts and calls on various asset classes, which earned him enough money to retire at an early age to philosophize. He develops the concept of antifragility and how to achieve it, what he calls optionality, by placing a bet on a perturbation in the system. A small bet can become a big winner if that perturbation is large enough. For example, a put option (a bet on a crash) on the stock market would have lost small amounts every year from 2001 to 2007, but then would have resulted in a windfall if held through the debacle of 2008. Options are insurance for when the rare cataclysm, ie, Black Swan event, occurs.

Antifragility is not a how-to investment book, it is a philosophy book. Taleb rails against those individuals in business and government he calls “fragilisitas” who engage in activity and promote policies that increase fragility in the economic system. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz are his favorite foils because they call for supporting weak actors who make bad decisions while ignoring the possibility of fat-tail events, those rare but devastating occurrences that can destroy entire systems.

Taleb, however, reserves special disdain for Alan Blinder, a former Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, who took the cynicism a step further. As a bank official, he enacted all manner of confusing regulations and then parlayed his “inside expertise” into a cottage industry upon leaving office, advising clients how to navigate these regulations. Furthermore, Blinder started a company that took advantage of FDIC deposit insurance for large corporations by splitting their colossal capital accounts into smaller accounts that would qualify for the FDIC protection. When asked if this were ethical, Blinder replied only that it was perfectly legal, while he collected prodigious fees from his clients. Taleb uses this as an example of the introduction of fragility into the economic system by cynical application of asymmetric knowledge and influence.

I enjoy Taleb’s passion and ranting, but it occurs to me that much of his self-admitted “anger” is misplaced. This fragility is inevitable. Relax and be entertained. For the vast majority of us the opportunity or inclination to act unethically is nonexistent, but a few sociopaths will always exist, so why bother fretting about the inevitable? Herb Stein, a Nixon White House economic advisor in the 1970’s, when dismissing the two-pronged dangers of the budget deficit and the trade deficit, coined Stein’s Law. To wit: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” While Taleb never mentions this particular maxim, I think he would embrace it nonetheless. In fact, for all Taleb’s withering banter about fragilisitas and fat-tails and black swans, I sense that he is all too aware of the inexorable nature of humans to embrace harrowing fallacies that lead to destruction. It’s what we do. After all, Taleb successfully navigated the options markets to make a bundle of cash, so while luck likely played a role he does have some concept of risk management and the human propensity to ignore risk. Taleb’s first book was a technical tome on financial options called “Dynamic Hedging”, so he definitely gets it.

On a more personal note, I enjoy listening to the spoken word versions of Taleb’s books, and I search my podcast app for any interviews of Nassim Taleb. One interview on some economic webcast actually took my breath away because of the eerie similarity of Taleb’s personality to that of my father, Vince. The passion, the erudition and even the speech cadence is uncannily similar (the audio books, unfortunately, are read by a polished professional actor.)  Not many people can expound on Seneca one moment and the next give a fairly accurate description of how skeletal muscle fibers function. This is like my father, who could explain how Jungian symbols of the collective unconscious correspond to the three levels of consciousness of the Huna religion one day and the next would give a textbook explanation of quantum mechanics and radioactive decay (he was a radiologist, later turned psychiatrist, by profession).  As they say, all that plus $8 will get you a six-pack of Anchor Steam.

Individuals who have such profound and wide-ranging interests are rare and usually misunderstood.  Their humility is masked by their intellectualism. Taleb’s humility is manifest in his admission that specific predictions about almost anything are impossible, hence the concept of Black Swan events and the importance of protecting yourself against any and all major cataclysms. He notes that financial commentators are forever trying to predict the “next Black Swan”, completely bolloxing the concept that such things are inherently unpredictable. You cannot know, so be humble.  Optionality in a broad sense is the only mitigation available.

My father also had a firm grasp of this idea that increasing fragility, or entropy, is natural and he gave excellent advice about becoming antifragile, although he had different terminology.  Amidst all the discussions about the Caeser’s Gallic Wars or conjecture about whether he could harness the noosphere to control a roll of the dice, pearls of wisdom would occasionally wiggle out. Unlike Taleb, Vince didn’t have an editor so it usually took effort by the listener to keep the conversation focused. Eventually, I gleaned that economic disasters occur once every generation or so, for Vince it was the Great Depression and World War II, and at the time of our discussions it was the crushing inflation of the 1970’s that followed Vietnam.  Shit WILL happen. The Great Recession of 2008 was inevitable in some form, and the next crisis is already in development somewhere.  The best protection, the optionality, is to learn a useful skill that even the Russians or Red Chinese will need. Fix furnaces or cars, or deliver babies; that will never go out of style and you will have insurance against fat-tail events.  Be thrifty, be skeptical, pay off your mortgage. Relax, the rest is entertainment.

Nassim Taleb’s Antifragility synthesizes several fields of interests into an overarching theme. He discusses the problems of agency, actors who lack skin in the game, the failure of even the best economic and biologic models, the human tendency toward bias, etc. My short review cannot do it justice. As a sequel to his previous works, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, this book successfully depicts the nature of the human condition, culturally and biologically. Read it, you’ll be richer for it.

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Taleb was a financial derivatives trader who made enough money in his 20's (born 1960) and checked out of the rat race to become a "philosopher." His book is a snarky but intellectual appraisal of the pseudo-knowledge employed in our financial markets and elsewhere. He argues that economics is a soft non-science that tries to legitimize itself with "statistical analysis" of risk using techniques such as the bell curve, standard deviation and other charlatanry, which only gives the field a veneer of validity.

He discusses the Black Swan, i.e. the unlikely event that always rears its head and has profound consequences. The unknowable unknown, the risk which cannot be assessed, is ignored by the managers of risk-- to the detriment of everyone. The book was written a few years ago and the lesson is prescient. Whether its 9-11, the Asian currency crisis of 1998, the Great Depression, the Influenza Epidemic, or the current mortgage solvency meltdown, the markets are always vulnerable to something unseen.

All of the successes in the world, whether it’s Bill Gates’ career or the discovery of penicillin, are reliant on a combination of skill and luck, but luck is always under-emphasized in the human brain. When fortunes are made, the human psyche is quick to take the credit, but when disaster strikes we blame some external phenomenon. Taleb does not call for paralysis in the face of such bias, only truth in assessing the risks and recognition of the lack of control we have. The world is a complicated, interconnected place and one hiccup-- whether man-made or natural-- can spell disaster. It's always the entity that was not anticipated that brings down the house.

Humans are vulnerable to several fallacies and biases that can have deleterious effects on our judgment. The narrative fallacy is the appeal of the story: we look for causation for events and this is often misleading. “The market crashed because x occurred this morning.” David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher outlined the problems with causation a couple centuries ago and we need to re-consider his premise now more than ever.

Another problem Taleb outlines is the Ludic fallacy, the idea that all of life resembles game theory with predictable structure and controllable randomness. In life, however, rules often do not apply and such structure, the idea of which is appealing, is absent.

Taleb discusses various biases to which humans attach themselves. The strongest is confirmation bias that is characterized by seeking “proofs” that our preconceived notions are true. We ignore or avoid information that contradicts our worldview. Coupled with narrative fallacy, confirmation bias can be deadly. While Taleb comes at these topics from a financial point of view, the philosophical constructs are applicable to any field, and I would argue that great understanding is at hand for most scientific fields.

The difference between Platonism--i.e., top-down theorizing ala the Ivory Tower-- versus Empiricism--i.e., experiential real-world knowledge-- is a particularly important part of Taleb’s thesis. We yearn to find science where this is none, whether it’s modern financial portfolio theory or alternative medicine; humans look for the comfort of proof that our preconceptions are valid. Often it’s not there.

The desire to create a narrative to explain history or current events leads to an overvaluation of these usually inaccurate facts. As a result, we overvalue the intellectual elite who proposes the narratives. The debacle of Long Term Capital Management, a group of Nobel Prize winning economists and “experts” who went bankrupt in the 1990’s, is an especially poignant example. The history of medicine is also rife with such false theoretical thinking, with examples of grand theories of bodily humours or gases which needed to be expelled or infused, often with horrific results. Only with the practice of empiric study— reasonable conclusions drawn from our collective experience-- can the truth be found if ever. But we must also know the limits of our empiric knowledge; some things just are not known.

The Black Swan is as important a book as any as we seek bedrock explanations for fast moving events in our globalized existence. Taleb’s points are interesting, his book excellent and my short discussion hardly does it justice.

Bleeding to Death...

Excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 essay on Nicholas Taleb (pictured at right), Blowing Up, and reprinted as part of his latest book What the Dog Saw:

"We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death," Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. "Say you've got a guy who is long on Russian bonds," Savery says. "He's making money every day. One day, lightning strikes and he loses five times what he made. Still, on three hundred and sixty-four out of three hundred and sixty-five days he was very happily making money. It's much harder to be the other guy, the guy losing money three hundred and sixty-four days out of three hundred and sixty-five, because you start questioning yourself. Am I ever going to make it back? Am I really right? What if it takes ten years? Will I even be sane ten years from now?" What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress. At Empirica, there is no feedback. "It's like you're playing the piano for ten years and you still can't play chopsticks," Spitznagel say, "and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you'll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff." Was it easy knowing that Niederhoffer -- who represented everything they thought was wrong -- was out there getting rich while they were bleeding away? Of course it wasn't . If you watched Taleb closely that day, you could see the little ways in which the steady drip of losses takes a toll. He glanced a bit too much at the Bloomberg. He leaned forward a bit too often to see the daily loss count. He succumbs to an array of superstitious tics. If the going is good, he parks in the same space every day; he turned against Mahler because he associates Mahler with the last year's long dry spell. "Nassim says all the time that he needs me there, and I believe him," Spitznagel says. He is there to remind Taleb that there is a point to waiting, to help Taleb resist the very human impulse to abandon everything and stanch the pain of losing. "Mark is my cop," Taleb says. So is Pallop: he is there to remind Taleb that Empirica has the intellectual edge.

Class Warfare Closer Every Day [Updated below]

The United States Congress and Senate will see remarkable turnover in this fall's elections. Unprecedented "retirements" and primary challenges will ensure that the Congress we have next year will look quite different than today's.

Such tumult is due to the general dissatisfaction the voters have for their elected representatives. You don't have to be a Tea Partier to feel angst toward the behemothic machine of greed and corruption that defines our corporations and government. Personally, I am always amazed at the acquiescence the general public exhibit.

The largest single expenditure of public wealth in my lifetime-- which was the waging of war in Iraq-- was surpassed in 2008 with a $780 billion bailout facility for banks. Never mind the sweetheart deal signed into law in 2003 under the name Medicare Part D, an entitlement that will cost taxpayers a trillion dollars over ten years.

My guess is that this massive wealth transfer was a large part of the rationale behind electing Barack Obama in 2008. Now after 12 months at the helm, girded by solid majorities in both Houses of Congress, we have no financial reform legislation, no health care reform, increased war expenditure in Afghanistan, and the world credit crisis is entering the second phase. The 2008 election was the closest thing to a revolution we could have had within the United States, giving the new leader broad latitude and high approval ratings to change the status quo, and yet we still have the same gridlock and pay-offs, filibusters and logjams, that we have always had.

The public is restless, and the politicians know it. Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) announced his surprise retirement yesterday and FireDogLake asks if this is because the PhARMA leadership is available, and the light bulb sparked to brightness. These folks are retiring from Congress because they know that change is afoot. The next change we see will be a complete collapse of the known political influence system; perhaps with much-need lobbyist reform, or better, publicly-financed elections. And guys like Bayh need to cash in NOW before the hammer comes down.

Nicolas Taleb, author of the Black Swan, warns us that the largest cataclysms are those that are unforeseeable, and they occur out of a clear blue sky. As the stock market makes it's recovery, job losses are pared and people start spending again, we could blind-sided by the next leg down in the global economic crisis. I'm not naive enough to believe I can predict what will occur, but there are plenty of oily rags laying about the garage that a spark from any of several sources-- Greece, Spain, CRE-- could ignite a conflagration.

Our ability to manage the next crisis will be limited since the world's central banks have already shot their wad of liquidity at the last crisis, and now they must weigh the risks of social unrest against the devaluing of their respective fiat currencies even more. Greece can cut public pensions only so much before the riots break out. Evan Bayh probably figures he's got about 24 months, at a million dollars per month as head of PhARMA or some other lobbying concern, before the class war hits Indianapolis. By then he'll have his stash secured.

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UPDATE at 1337hrs

Aproximately 6 hours after the post, the news services are reporting a bomb has exploded in the JP Morgan branch in Athens. The civil unrest may be closer than we thought, Mr. Taleb notwithstanding.

Links to Drink By... Our Modern Culture Edition

1. Where I defend Sarah Palin.... (sort of): Michael Joseph Gross, in the latest Vanity Fair, all over the TeeVee today, explores the world of the Wasilla warrior, with all the gratuitous, off-the-record angst that we've come to expect from the Literate Class. To wit: "Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible." No shit. That sounds like me on some of my better days. Gross effuses that Palin sees evil everywhere, she's not well-read, she makes a lot of money, her fans love her, others hate her. Eight pages? It's dramatic, I get it, now tell me something new, dude. And for Democrats still flabbergasted that such a sociopath could make it to a national ticket, I have two words: Ambulance Chaser, and one more while we're at it: Joementum. (Of course, nobody has killed more soldiers and civilians, or wasted more money than the King of VP sociopaths.)

2. Mike Posner, the whole disc (shown at right) is very good.

3. PZ opines on the "Mosque." Again, I wish I had written this: "...we lose our democratic soul if we lose our tolerance for stupid ideas." And, "Naturally, I dislike the idea of constructing religious buildings anywhere, since they are a colossal waste of community resources, typically represent unproductive holes in the tax base, and promote stupid thinking — but guess what? Those aren't legal cause to interfere with people's right to waste their time and money. Also, if we accept the privilege of individual autonomy and personal freedom, we don't have moral cause to interfere." If there is such a thing as a soul, mine is modeled after PZ's.

4. The Iraq war ledger: Was it worth it? This CAP assessment is a necessary adjunct to mine.

5. Has it really been over 2 years since I reviewed Nassim Taleb's Black Swan? Well, I'm re-reading it now and enjoying it even more. BTW, it's good to see that Taleb is his usual cranky self these days.

6. If you haven't read Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, do it. I laughed, I cried-- I almost cried--no, I did cry... Good book, well-written, epic story of missionaries, medicine, Catholicism, clash of cultures, family, Africa, war, immigration. You'll be entertained and learn a lot, I did. I'll provide a more thorough review at some point.

7. Should women be ordained as Roman Catholic priests? Okay, I admit that since reading Christopher's blog I've spent an inordinate amount of time re-connecting with my Roman Catholic roots. Part of it might be to see if they are still as whack as I remember--it's been a good 25 years since I stopped calling myself Catholic-- but I have to say that I appreciate the consistency in the dogma. Here's is an excellent list of the reasons why women will never be priests, and it's well-written (ah, the benefits of a parochial school education.) BTW, I also picked up Last Catholic in America at the library, written by an alum from my high school, but I haven't shown it to the wife-- she's getting a little worried about my newfound interest in the Church.

Enough for now, I've got work to do!

Economics and the Avoidance of Armageddon

My open letter to the Anti-pundit, who sent references without any adjoining opinion or discussion.  I'll assume he wanted to solicit my opinion, so here it is.  I welcome a response and discussion.

Items in question:

Greenwald:  http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/04/summers/index.html

Moyers and Black: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/4/716394/-Moyers-drops-bailout-bomb-on-Obama

Ritholtz on AIG: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/aig-before-cds-there-was-reinsurance/#more-22986

I read the references that you sent.  Black is correct in maligning the marriage between Washington and Wall Street, but he acts like this is something new.  In fact, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton, we've had corruption at the highest levels of finance and govt.  And I would say it's even worse in other types of govt models like Communism (Russia is the obvious example, but also we see it in Cuba) and monarchies (QE1 had a stranglehold on the financial system of the world; feudal lords were also an obvious example).

I'm not saying it's okay, just saying that money and power will always get married.  Greenwald implies that a new President can change the status quo in 90 days and that is unrealistic.  While I agree with the sentiment, I can appreciate the practicality of keeping the system intact for now.  There is also a marriage between the educational system and the financial world with the brightest students pursuing careers on Wall Street because that is where the money is.  Sure, there are exceptions like Krugman and Romer and Geithner, who are lifetime academics, but they are rare exceptions.  Romer is chair of Obama's CEA after all.  Geithner is a career govt official.

For the president to ignore Sunmers' and Rubins' input would be lunacy.  We also assume that Obama is blindly following the advice of one side of the debate which is not necessarily true. 

Black made the analogy of a plane wreck and bemoaned having the pilots who crashed the plane lead the investigation.  To use his analogy, I would say we are still cleaning up the debris on the runway and seeing if there are any survivors. Any investigation I have seen so far, such as with the Congressional hearings, has devolved into inane political posturing by the representatives.  I cannot figure out who is the dumber, Maxine Waters or Michelle Bachmann.  Even Barney Frank, who is hailed as the smartest guy on Finance in Washington, seems to have a very superficial understanding of the crisis for someone who has been involved with the issue for 2 decades.  

To wax philosophical for a moment, money is the property of the federal reserve-- they print it and control how much is in circulation.  We can accept it as a payment for the labor and goods we provide, but no law says you are required to do this.  The resolution of this crisis may require the devaluation of dollars at some point, but that point has not come yet, at least not in relationship to other currencies and commodities-- which is after all the only practical way of valuing a currency.   The federal reserve is a quasi private organization of banks and we can only loosely control its management.  Each of us has to make a determination of our value to society and we can choose to accept or reject the offer made.  (Ask John Galt.)   

Black and Greenwald and Moyers have a lot of bile for the status quo and the way it is being handled, and I can appreciate their skepticism and frustration.  But, they offer no alternative solutions.  In September, we approached the edge of the abyss and we successfully backed away.  Not everyone appreciates how close we were to financial Armageddon.  This is not to say that we should not or could not have seen it coming.  Economists like Taleb and Roubini and Ritholtz and many others have been railing about it for years (and reading Ritholtz since 2006 has likely saved me tens of thousands of dollars), although each one of them have intimated in various venues that they had no idea it would unwind so quickly.  Even a semi-coherent non-professional could figure out that lifestyles were out of hand:  entire subdivisions of $500,000 homes were built on speculation, total household debt is 100% of GDP, our trade imbalance is increasing exponentially, federal budget deficits are rising due to wasteful unnecessary war.  And so on.  It has taken us 25 years to reach this point.

I would also comment that as bad as this situation still is, look at the bright side.  It is being managed without bloodshed, revolution or massive dislocations in peoples' lifestyles (so far).  Just look to 40 years ago when a similar (I would even say less severe) crisis occurred in China.  What was the solution?  The Cultural Revolution orchestrated by the Party slaughtered 35 million people.  Or look to the Wiemar Republic in 1933.  After several years of crushing Depression, they elected Hitler as Chancellor whose solution was to exterminate a third of the population and start a world war where 50 million people died.  I hope we have learned from the past enough to avoid such extreme outcomes, but there is no guarantee.

Today we have safety nets: Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, etc.  The crisis will not inundate everyone all at once. That is why we pay our taxes for 20 years and whine that it's not worth it, then all of a sudden, it is worth it.  That's the wisdom of FDR and Ike and like minded progressives.

Ritholtz points out that before AIG developed CDS', we had reinsurance.  I would add that we also had portfolio insurance, S&L shenanigans, internet bubbles, tulip bubbles, etc.  The financial industry has a long history of creating "products" that are designed to bilk us out of our hard-earned labor and the history likely goes back to the first Cro-magnon man selling ink to write on cave walls in France.  As dour as Ritholtz has been for the last several years, I think it's only fair to point out that he has recently called for people to get back into the market and invest in stocks.  I tend to agree with Ritholtz that someone at AIG intended to commit fraud; he's the lawyer and I'll defer to his professinal opinion.

So, bad economic conditions can have dire consequences and calling for a complete takedown of the status quo would have a plethora of unintended consequences, mostly bad.  The solution must be practical.  My opinion is that Obama is handling the greatest economic crisis in 80 years with unbelievable aplomb.  I have no idea if it will have a better or worse outcome than we had in the 1930's or 1917 or the 1870's, and neither does anyone else.  I do know that ignoring the problem, castigating individual banks, calling for massive large bankruptcies, allowing unemployment to reach 25%, being vindictive and wasting time putting the pilots on trial while the passengers are burning to death... all should be options that off the table.

Black and Moyers seem to think that we should dismantle the reserve banking system by 9:00 am next Tuesday.  Is that really in the best interest of the working man?  There will be plenty of time for Waters and Bachmann to make political hay, but let's clean up the runway first.