Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.