Why accidents are rarely accidental and how to prevent them

Understanding risk, randomness and uncertainty from every angle is the intellectual stimulation du jour. The high priest of this new genre of study is, of course, Nassim Taleb, whose two books have set a standard of scholarship that is unmatched. Taleb’s argument is that we don’t know what we don’t know and, therefore, we need to...

We are enjoying decades of peace. It is easy to forget that in the same terrain we are standing free today, marauding killer mobs of thousands had roamed just a few decades ago, uprooting millions, as countries were heartlessly split.

If they could make it to their new country, through burning trains and broken bridges, the uprooted millions were herded into shanties of misery.

When he...

The current turbulence in the financial environment calls for a different approach to investing in distressed securities and markets. The ongoing restructuring of capital markets presents a multitude of opportunities, says renowned ‘distress investor’ Marty Whitman. Facing the deep gloom and doom last December, Whitman had said that we are faced with a lifetime opportunity to invest in stocks....