Many people believed that the banking crisis was unforeseeable, but you disagreed.
Well, I wrote in my book The Black Swan that the banking system was sitting on dynamite. I made bets on it because nobody was listening.
Your investments and books have made millions. Do people ask you for financial advice?
Yeah, but I don’t answer. That’s not my profession. I am a thinker. I like to use investment as a discipline.
In what way?
My motto is: “Never forecast anything unless you have your neck on the line.”
Is there one person you think is most to blame for the financial situation we find ourselves in?
There’s a collective, but I blame Ben Bernanke the most. He studied the Great Depression, so he should know better. Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don’t take the unskilled seriously.
A new version of The Black Swan has just come out. What’s the theory behind it?
There are things we don’t understand – low-probability, high-impact events – and they hurt us. In the first version, I identified those things. Now, I’ve written about what to do next.
Why is your opinion of economists so low?
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
Why did economists get the crisis so wrong?
That’s like asking why fortune-tellers don’t get things right. Their tools don’t work, but they continue to use them. And the Nobel committee gives prizes to people who aren’t scientists.
You have a great phrase in The Black Swan: “Don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.” Is that still happening?
Worse. I was talking about Bernanke – they’ve given him a bigger bus.
Here in the UK, the government is giving even more power to our central bank.
Your new government is at least conscious. You don’t have the Office of Management and Budget, which never forecasts anything right.
We’ll soon have an office of budget control.
But here they understand. David Cameron understands expert problems. He is extraordinary.
You have described him as “the best thing we have left on this planet”.
Exactly. I went to Washington, and the discourse had nothing to do with the real problem. And I thought, “He’s the only thing we have left.”
What would you advise Cameron to do?
Build robustness in the economy. You have to take some pain to remove the tumour.
You’ve written a lot about chance and probability. Do you believe in God?
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.
What’s your view of the “new atheists”, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
They’re charlatans. But see the contradiction: people are sceptical about God, yet gullible when it comes to the stock market.
Your family is Lebanese, and lost its wealth in the civil war. Has that shaped your views?
The key to wealth is that it doesn’t matter. Once you’ve had it, you don’t think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
You say in your book that four former Lehman employees sent you death threats.
I’m a threat to people on Wall Street. Typically, I’m better off than my detractors in finance, and higher-ranking than the economists, and I have more readers than the journalists.
What book has most influenced you recently?
The maxims of a Roman slave called Publilius Syrus. And maybe Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Are you a happy man?
Where is the trace of the happy man?
You look happy! You’re a bestselling author with as many fans as detractors.
Ah, detractors. Actually, you trust them more than fans. Fans send you two emails before breakfast, and if you don’t reply they turn into detractors. Detractors are more predictable.
What would you like to forget?
My detractors look for incoherence in what I’ve written. They haven’t found it, but if they do . . .
Is there a plan?
To make society more robust, or stop it from getting more fragile. I wish I didn’t have to, so I could do something more pleasant for myself.
Are we all doomed?
Economically? Not if we do the right thing and bite the bullet.
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