There are a lot of ways that investment banking models work, but these risks are not internalized by the people that are taking them.

I agree with a lot of the points in Taleb's book, but I don't agree with many of his conclusions. It seems to me that he rightly points out that risk managers miss a lot of the risks, but the conclusion is that he draws, is that we should abandon risk management, whereas my conclusion is we should improve it.

I mean, we've always had gold bugs, but now we sort of realize that Treasure Bills might be in the same category. And we have derivatives like credit default swaps which are in this category, and we have derivatives like volatilities that are actually an asset class that we can invest in which are now - would out perform if we have another financial crisis.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside.

We're talking about should we increase taxes? Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.

I don't see what the alternative to risk management is. If it's just getting rid of the models and instead using the smart people who can figure it out? How do you train them? What do you teach them? Do you just put them in a cockpit and let them stumble for 10 years of their life and then after that they're good at it?