My Take | How I learned to love those stories predicting a China or US collapse
- Doom and gloom warnings about the two economies resemble zombie apocalypse films, offering cheap thrills for a short time, if nothing else
If you consume global news as I do, like junk food, you may develop an unhealthy sense of impending doom.
It seems every few days, some big names in this or that field of profession or academia are predicting the collapse of the American or Chinese economy, that China’s communist state will cease to exist in a few years – or a decade or two – or that the United States is facing a second civil war.
You can probably throw in the collapse of the German economy and the coming ruin of the European Union. It’s the end of the world, and I haven’t even mentioned the Middle East.
But let’s stick with China and the United States, two countries I am somewhat less ignorant about than the others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the financial mathematician and writer, is now predicting “a white swan” for the US economy, as opposed to a “black swan”, which is the title of his famous book. This is partly thanks to the myth that no one saw the last global financial crisis – and its trigger which was the US real estate collapse – coming. Actually, quite a few people did and made tons of money out of it, while most of us lost our shirts.
Well, Taleb is calling it a white swan, because it is predictable or probable, rather than being extremely rare or hard to predict.
