Nassim Taleb, a former Wall Street trader and author of the famous book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” is being attacked this morning by the financial community in different social media outlets, mainly Twitter, after a Bloomberg article quoted him saying he favours investing in Europe over the U.S., and include comments such as:
“I am not afraid of Europe, or investing in Europe. I’m afraid of the United States.”
“Of course Europe has its problems, but it’s in much better shape than the United States.”
“Europe is like someone who is ill but is conscious of it. In the United States we are ill, but we don’t know it. We don’t talk about it.”
Here you can see a few reactions:
And CNBC’s Kelly Evans:
And The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson:
But Taleb says Bloomberg distorted his lecture and was quoted later by Business Insider as saying that he was “massively angry” for being taken out of context:
On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) said the Eurozone is confronted with the prospect of “financial disintegration” and should use its new bailout fund to recapitalize distressed banks directly while embarking on a transnational banking union.
In over 1,000 pages of diagnosis and policy prescriptions on the dire condition of the European economy and how to try to end almost three years of euro crisis, the commission also talked up the merits of Eurobonds or pooling of Eurozone debt, a proposal gaining in traction but strongly resisted for now by the biggest economy, Germany.
Click here to read a detailed review of the EC report on the Eurozone crisis, by The Guardian.
(Hat tip, Joseph Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider)