INTRODUCTIONRead more at location 48
Note: INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ finanza. summers: ormai le banche hanno gli strumenti x stabilizzare qls crisi... finanza. minsky: gli interventi della fed hanno scongiurato molte crisi finanaziarie ma lo hanno fatto alzando i rischi ovvrro gonfiando la bolla della grande crisi quella in cui tutti soccomberanno... dal 1982 al 2007: calma piatta nella finanza. attivismo della fed. comportamenti ad alto rischio degli attori. la grande crisi decennale partita nel 2007… le medicine rilassano il corpo. i rimedi rilassano i comportamenti... la fiducia neglu argini causa il disastro di katrina... la fiducia in un euro permanente lo porta quasi a collassare... la fiducia nei canali di scolo porta al disastro di fukushima... quanti più sicuro è un argine tanti più danni farà l alluvione... gli incendi sono dovuti al cambiamento climatico? forse. di sicuro gran parte di essi si spiega con la crescente efficienza dei soccorsi... la paura è la più efficace misura di sicurezza... le vittime dei freni antibloccaggio... il caschetto dei giocatori ha mutato le fratture nn le h ridotte... se il bimbo nn è nel suo seggiolino vai più prudente? allora significa che se sta nel seggiolino sei più spericolato... più l ambiente è complesso più la catastrofe è possibile... la storia del titanic: la nave inaffondabile... la borsa non è un posto x vecchi: la memoria fa stare prudenti con profitti bassi e clienti in fuga... tutto si fa in nome della stabilità. giusto studire come arricchirsi ma giusto scoprire i segreti della vita sicura e della stabilità illusoria... il desiderio di stabilità confligge con quello di complessità e specializzazione. il rischio è come un patterio: lo cauterizxi ma lui riemerge mutato altrove... VAR value at risk: valuta soppesando la volatilitá passata: un lungo xiodo di stabilità spinge ad esporsi... guaio: la fede nella storia passata... europa: grande crisi frutto del grande successo: dopo l unione tassi bassi al sud.ma la moneta facile ha contribuito ad aggravare la crisi successiva... tesi: l instabilitá nn deriva da cattovi comportamenti ma da periodi molto prolungati di stabilità. il moralismo ci fa xdere di vista qualcosa... l illusione statistica: nel mondo delle conseguenze inintenzionali (negatività più rare e più intense) l illusione statistica può essere forte... il trade off è positivo? nn lo sappiamo... imho. regola peltzman: la regola di sicurezza innesca comportamenti che mantengono inalterati i rischi. regola ip: la sicurezza aumenta i rischi. condizioni regola ip: operatori connessi in rete ed effetto domino dei danni... Edit
Friday, the thirteenth of October, 1989, had been a quiet day in the stock market; so quiet that some traders went home early. Then around 3 p.m., news broke that a takeover of an airline company had fallen through. The news unleashed a cascade of selling, and by day’s end the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plummeted 7 percent.Read more at location 49
Federal Reserve conferred with their foreign counterparts, then put out word that they stood ready to pump moneyRead more at location 54
When markets reopened Monday, no such action proved necessary; the Dow quickly recouped half of Friday’s drop.Read more at location 55
Larry Summers, who would later serve as Treasury secretary to Bill Clinton and adviser to Barack Obama, had a theory. Technological and financial innovation, he told the group, had indeed made finance more bubble-prone.Read more at location 59
“It is now nearly inconceivable that there would be no active lender of last resort in time of crisis.”Read more at location 63
Since the 1960s, he said, the authorities had staved off another depression by reacting to every crisis with some combination of government borrowing and Federal Reserve lending. But each success, he warned, simply compounded the behavior that made the system crisis-prone.Read more at location 65
The last speaker on the panel was Paul Volcker, who had stepped down two years earlier as Fed chairman. He agreed with Summers that the world had more tools for dealing with crises. But his own take was closer to Minsky’s.Read more at location 69
using these tools repeatedly and aggressively we end up reinforcing the behavior patterns that aggravate the risk in the first place.”Read more at location 73
The federal government was indeed effective at ironing out the ups and downs of the economy and dealing with periodic financial mayhem; the years from 1982 to 2007 were uncommonly tranquil.Read more at location 75
Volcker feared, nurtured risk taking until the stage was set for a devastating crisis. This has been quite the decade for catastrophe.Read more at location 77
America’s crisis was the result of the twenty-five years of economic stabilityRead more at location 84
break up the euro was possible because of how convinced people were that the euro was permanent.Read more at location 84
The enormous toll taken by Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and the tsunami that knocked out Fukushima can be attributed to the determination and ingenuity with which engineers and settlers have built citiesRead more at location 85
Levees and other works had been built along the Mississippi as far back as the early 1700s so that its banks and floodplains could be used for settlement, farming, and industry. As a result, when levees fail, more people are flooded. Japan has built seawalls along its coast to protect its cities and industry from tsunamis. This encouraged the growth of population and the siting of nuclear power plants along the coasts.Read more at location 87
What all these things had in common was that they made people feel safe, and the feeling of safety allowed danger to reemerge, often hidden from view.Read more at location 91
“Only the paranoid survive” is legendary Intel chief executive Andy Grove’s adviceRead more at location 96
Ample research demonstrates this point. Fender benders and minor injuries are more common when roads are covered in snow or ice than when they are dry, but serious injuries and fatalities are actually less common because drivers are traveling more slowly and carefully.Read more at location 97
In professional sports, hard helmets have reduced some injuries such as skull fractures, but increased others such as concussions.Read more at location 101
if I notice that one of my children hasn’t done up his or her seat belt, I slow down.Read more at location 105
As our environment becomes more complex, so do our interactions and the potential for unintended consequences and catastrophe.Read more at location 108
The Titanic’s crew sailed at top speed through ice-infested waters believing their ship to be unsinkable.Read more at location 110
The Deepwater Horizon had one of the best safety records in BP’s fleet of drilling rigs; indeed, some of the company’s executives were on it one night in April 2010 to learn more about that record.Read more at location 114
One study of cars equipped with antilock brakes found they were involved in fewer front-end collisions but more rear-end collisions,Read more at location 124
It is difficult for anyone to model in their mind how their actions affect anyone else’s.Read more at location 126
Yet in suppressing such fires, they encourage people to live near the brushland and allow forests to grow denser, which provides the fuel for even bigger fires.Read more at location 127
On Wall Street, those who take risks can reap spectacular rewards. Those with longer memories hang back; their performance and profits suffer, and customers go elsewhere. Thus, trading is a young person’s profession. This explains why rogue traders, blowups, and Ponzi schemes appear with distressing frequency on Wall Street.Read more at location 129
The history of civilization is the history of us trying to foolproof existence,Read more at location 138
But societies and economies, like bacterial colonies, are not inherently stable.Read more at location 142
conflict with an equally irrepressible desire to make things bigger and more complicated.Read more at location 145
incident-free system becomes mute” is how René Amalberti, a French doctor, risk expert, and former air force general, puts it. In aviation, crashes have become so rare that it is increasingly difficult to anticipate the sorts of eventsRead more at location 147
successfully preventing one type of risk may simply funnel it elsewhere, to reemerge, like a mutated bacteria,Read more at location 151
Financial institutions, for example, monitor their risk with a formula called “value at risk,” or VaR. Vastly simplified, VaR asks how much money would be lost if securities or interest rates fluctuate as much as they did at their most volatile moment in the recent past. A long period of calm will thus naturally lead a bank to raise its exposure.Read more at location 154
Europe. Its pursuit of integration was in great part a response to periodic political and economic crises,Read more at location 175
A single currency, the leaders concluded, would make such speculative attacks a thing of the past.Read more at location 179
Interest rates in Italy, Spain, and Greece plunged to German levels. Yet this very success planted the seeds of the later crisis by allowing those countries to accumulate staggering amounts of debt.Read more at location 181
If it were only bad behavior at work, the answer would be straightforward: pass more rules, and enforce them vigorously. But by seeing these events solely as a morality play, we’re going to miss something very important and make it harder to solve them. Oftentimes, it’s not the nefarious stuff that does us in; it’s the well intentioned. Those well-intentioned efforts to safeguard humanity from economic, environmental, and technological harm pay substantial dividends. The fact that there is a tradeoff between these benefits and their unintended consequences doesn’t tell us whether the tradeoff is positive or negative.Read more at location 190
