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Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted the 2008 financial crisis, by pointing out that commonly-used risk models were wrong.  Distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University, author of best-sellers The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, Taleb became financially independent after the crash of 1987, and wealthy during the 2008 financial crisis.

Now, Taleb is using his statistical risk acumen to take on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Taleb’s conclusion:  GMOs could cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.”

Sound crazy?

Sure it does … but only because we don’t understand statistics, and so we have no handle on what’s risky and what’s not.

Taleb and his 2 co-authors write in a new draft paper:

For nature, the “ruin” is ecocide: an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.

 

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Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs fall squarely under [the precautionary principle, i.e. the rule that we should err on the side of caution if something is really dangerous] not because of the harm to the consumer because of their systemic risk on the system.

 

Top-down modifications to the system (through GMOs) are categorically and statistically different from bottom up ones (regular farming, progressive tinkering with crops, etc.) There is no comparison between the tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of arbitrarily taking a gene from an organism and putting it into another. Saying that such a product is natural misses the statistical process by which things become ”natural”. [i.e. evolving over thousands of years in a natural ecosystem, or at least breeding over several generations.]

 

What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global. I do not wish to pay—or have my descendants pay—for errors by executives of Monsanto. We should exert the precautionary principle there—our non-naive version—simply because we would only discover errors after considerable and irreversible environmental damage.

Taleb shreds GMO-boosters – including biologists – who don’t understand basic statistics:

Calling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays a very poor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilistic payoffs and risk management.

 

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It became popular to claim irrationality for GMO and other skepticism on the part of the general public —not realizing that there is in fact an ”expert problem” and such skepticism is healthy and even necessary for survival. For instance, in The Rational Animal, the author pathologize people for not accepting GMOs although ”the World Health Organization has never found evidence of ill effects” a standard confusion of evidence of absence and absence of evidence. Such a pathologizing is similar to behavioral researchers labeling hyperbolic discounting as ”irrational” when in fact it is largely the researcher who has a very narrow model and richer models make the ”irrationality” go away).

In other words, lack of knowledge of basic statistical principles leads GMO supporters astray. For example, they don’t understand the concept that “interdependence” creates  “thick tails” … leading to a “black swan” catastrophic risk event:

Fat tails result (among other things) from the interdependence of components, leading to aggregate variations becoming much more severe than individual ones. Interdependence disrupts the functioning of the central limit theorem, by which the aggregate is more stable than the sum of the parts. Whether components are independent or interdependent matters a lot to systemic disasters such as pandemics or generalized crises. The interdependence increases the probability of ruin, to the point of certainty.

(This concept is important in the financial world, as well.)

As Forbes’ Brian Stoffel notes:

Let’s say each GM seed that’s produced holds a 0.1% chance of — somehow, in the intricately interdependent web of nature — leading to a catastrophic breakdown of the ecosystem that we rely on for life. All by itself, it doesn’t seem too harmful, but with each new seed that’s developed, the risk gets greater and greater.

 

The chart below demonstrates how, over time, even a 0.1% chance of ecocide can be dangerous.

 

I cannot stress enough that the probabilities I am using are for illustrative purposes only. Neither I, nor Taleb, claim to know what the chances are of any one type of seed causing such destruction.

 

The focus, instead, should be on the fact that the “total ecocide barrier” is bound to be hit, over a long enough time, with even incredibly small odds. Taleb includes a similar graph in his work, but no breakdown of the actual variables at play.

Taleb debunks other pro-GMO claims as well, such as:

 

1. The Risk of Famine If We Don’t Use GMOs. Taleb says:

Invoking the risk of “famine” as an alternative to GMOs is a deceitful strategy, no different from urging people to play Russian roulette in order to get out of poverty.

And calling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays a very poor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilistic payoffs and risk management.

2.  Nothing Is Totally Safe, So Should We Discard All Technology?  Taleb says this is an anti-scientific argument. Some risks are small, or are only risks to one individual or a small group of people.  When you’re talking about risks which could wipe out all life on Earth, it’s a totally different analysis.

3. Assuming that Nature Is Always Good Is Anti-Scientific.  Taleb says that statistical risk analysis don’t use assumptions such as nature is “good” or “bad”. Rather, it looks at the statistical evidence that things persist in nature for thousands of years if they are robust and anti-fragile.  Ecosystems break down if they become unstable.

GMO engineers may be smart in their field, but they are ignorant when it comes to long-run ecological reality:

We are not saying nature is the smartest pos­sible, we are saying that time is smarter than GMO engineers. Plain statistical significance.

4.  People Brought Potatoes from the Americas Back to Europe, Without Problem.  Taleb says that potatoes evolved and competed over thousands of years in the Americas, and so proved that they did not disrupt ecosystems. On the other hand, GMOs are brand spanking new … created in the blink of the eye in a lab.

GMOs Also INCREASE Pesticide Use, DECREASE Crop Yield, And May Be VERY Dangerous to Your Health

As if the risk of “ecocide”isn’t enough, there are many other reasons to oppose GMO foods – at least without rigorous testing – including:

• Decreased crop yield

• Increased pesticide requirements

• Potentially severe health effects

On the plus side?  A few companies will make a lot of money.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1htm2Ro George Washington

Forget “iron fist”, it appears Vladimir has found something better….

 

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By now all of our readers, if not so much the ECB (even though we know they read us religiously too), are aware that the biggest problem in Europe is the continent’s moribund, and record low, credit creation courtesy of a clogged monetary transmission pipeline which has resulted in a -2% “growth” in loans to the private sector, which as monetarists (and certainly Austrians) everywhere know is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition to stimulate inflation in a continent drowning in deflation.

 

This is also why, as we reported first back in October, rumors have been swirling that the ECB itself is now contemplating launching QE, although judging by the amount of endless chatter in recent weeks by both Draghi and Weidmann, it is becoming increasingly evident that Europe will do nothing and is hoping that merely jawboning will launch inflation as happened after Draghi’s summer of 2012 “whatever it takes” speech. How ironic that two years later, Draghi will do “whatever it takes” to crush the Euro… except actually do anything.

And confirming that the ECB will almost guaranteed not do QE, is the latest report from the FT that “European regulators are preparing to get their hands dirty by easing rules on an asset class once labelled toxic sludge, in a bid to boost lending to credit-starved small businesses in the region.” Translated – Europe is about to literally “unleash” the toxic sludge, i.e., all the worst of the worst debt that was the reason why Europe is in a 6 year-old depression, and hope and pray it somehow fixes itself.

From the FT:

The European market for securitisation has all but closed for business since the crisis, when the practice of slicing and dicing of loans into packages known as asset-backed securities was blamed for letting problems in the market for US subprime housing loans spread through the global financial system.

 

The EU is now seeking to revive the moribund market, an objective which is shared by the European Central Bank. Mario Draghi, ECB president, has hinted that were there sufficient liquidity in the market for asset-backed securities, the ECB would be prepared to buy them to counter the rising risk of deflation.

 

“We think that a revitalisation of a certain type of [asset-backed security], a so-called plain vanilla [asset-backed security], capable of packaging together loans, bank loans, capable of being rated, priced and traded, would be a very important instrument for revitalising credit flows and for our own monetary policy,” Mr Draghi said last month.

 

Michel Barnier, the EU commissioner responsible for financial services, will make it easier for insurers, one of the industry’s biggest potential customers, to hold these assets by easing capital rules on their holdings of relatively safe forms of these securities.

 

A revised draft of technical rules to implement Solvency II, the law governing the European insurance industry, seen by the Financial Times, reveals officials are planning to halve the capital requirements on securitisations deemed to be of high enough quality. 

 

Under the changes, the capital requirements on the safest securitisations would be sliced in half from 4.3 per cent to 2.1 per cent.

 

The move is part of a broader set of measures to support financing to the bloc’s businesses, which rely on bank lending far more than their US counterparts. A pledge to rebuild a European market for the repackaging of loans is set to feature in an update on the European Commission’s green paper on the future of finance, due to be unveiled on Thursday.

Sigh. What else can one possibly add here but…

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Gold prices are down 6.6% from the post-Crimea referendum highs mid-March (but remain up 9% in 2014). For the 3rd day in a row, precious metals have come under sudden selling pressure and this morning’s has pushed Silver comfortably back below $20 and gold now back under $1,300. Notably copper prices are also fading on the heels of Chinese weakness overnight.

 

3rd day in a row of monkey-hammering…

 

Clearly there is a “war” premium supposedly coming out of PMs but we suspect this pressure is also coming from Chinese financing deals as we noted previously

 

Copper is also falling today…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

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While the West keeps talking of “costs” for Russia – whether they be economic or social-freedom – it appears one company is benefiting from the post-sanctions period. OAO Moscow Exchange, the Russian stock exchange, is up 40% from Match 13th lows just before voters in Crimea voted to join Russia. As Bloomberg reports, daily equity trading volumes at the exchange surged to a record 72 billion rubles ($2 billion) in the first three weeks of March, compared with an average of 35 billion in February, the bourse said yesterday, as the exchange is “clearly benefiting from the current volatile environment.”

 

 

As one analyst noted,

“There is nothing negative for their business in the short term, from all that is going on on a geopolitical level. Revenues will be correlated with volume increases.”

“We’re seeing different types of behavior of the customers,” Alexander Afanasiev, the chief executive officer of the Moscow Exchange, said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday. “Some of them are exiting the market, some of them are using the volatility, some are seeking new opportunities because they think that the Russian assets are currently definitely undervalued.”

 

The Moscow Exchange posted a 41 percent profit gain to 11.6 billion rubles in 2013 as revenue increased 14 percent to 24.6 billion rubles, the bourse said in a March 14 statement. The bourse, which raised 15 billion rubles in a February 2013 initial public offering, has been revamping its operations and is set to make equities available through Euroclear Bank SA in July to lure trading from offshore platforms.

 

Moscow Exchange’s revenue is expected to increase to a record 25.6 billion rubles in 2014, according to the mean estimate of 10 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

 

“We see a strong trend for trading more in Russia and more original shares,” Afanasiev said.

Source: Bloomberg

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Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

Fed Chair Janet Yellen thinks the US economy is under-performing because we don’t have enough inflation:

“Inflation has continued to run below the committee’s 2 percent objective… the FOMC continues to expect inflation to move gradually back towards its objective….(but)… is mindful that inflation running persistently below its objective could pose risks to economic performance.”

This is not simply another case of “Let them eat iPads” cynicism. Hitting the wholly arbitrary 2% inflation target is sacred doctrine inside the Eccles Cathedral, and Yellen takes her scriptures, along with her money printing, every bit as literally did as the legendary William Jennings Bryan. Indeed, failing the inflation target “from below” amounts to a Cardinal Sin.

So not surprisingly, during the past 168 months running the rate of inflation according to the Fed’s preferred measure called the PCE deflator has come in exactly at a 2.0 CAGR – the annual rate embedded in the 14-year index gain of 31.65% shown in the table below. You might think the paint-by-the-numbers Keynesians who run the Fed would be thoroughly satisfied with their inflation targeting performance—even if, as Paul Volcker cogently noted, it does mathematically result in the theft of half of a working man’s savings over his lifetime.

Not exactly. The monetary politburo has been gumming about periodic bouts of too-low inflation and even “deflation” ever since Bernanke arrived in 2002. Yet unless the Fed’s unrelenting pursuit of “mission creep” has led it to the conclusion that its mandate under the wholly elastic and content-free Humphrey-Hawkins Act requires hitting its quantitative targets on an annualized seasonally-maladjusted basis every week, there is not a hint of inflation shortfall during the entire 21st Century to date.

In fact, the table above presents the cost-of-living increases that have been endured by that substantial share of the public which has eaten food or consumed fuel sometime during the past 14 years. At best, according to the official CPI—which is apparently good enough for 50 million Social Security recipients— the cost of living has actually risen by 2.4% per year or 39 percent over the period.

And even that’s got some self-evident understatement to it. Fully 25% of the CPI is accounted for by “imputed rents” on owner-occupied homes. This figure is obtained by a BLS survey of approximately 0.0002% of the nation’s 75 million homeowners asking what they would charge to rent their homes to a stranger each month. Needless to say, the tens of millions of households who have struggled with mortgage foreclosures, delinquencies and under-water loans since the housing bust have undoubtedly not been very bullish about their rental market prospects—even as their actual cash expenses for property taxes, utilities and household repair and maintenance expenses have continued to surge.

So when you get by the rent imputations and the ”hedonic adjustments”  for cars, toasters, big screen TVs and iPads— the rest of the cost-of-living menu has been downright inflationary. Renters’ costs have risen one-third faster than the Fed’s target; electricity bills rose by double; college tuition is up by 2.3X and ground beef, eggs, movie tickets and health care by three-fold.  And, of course, hydrocarbon-based energy is not even in the Fed’s zip code: Gasoline prices have out-run the target by 5X since January 2000 and  home heating oil in places like the Northeast by 6X.

In short, the idea of “under-shooting inflation from below” is just ritual incantation. It provides the monetary central planners an excuse to keep the printing presses running red hot, but the true aim is not hard to see. After a 30 year rolling national LBO that has taken credit market debt outstanding to $59 trillion and to an off-the-charts leverage ratio of 3.5X national income, the American economy is saddled with $30 trillion of incremental household, business, financial and public debt compared to its historically sound leverage ratio of 1.5X GDP.

We are at peak debt. Household, business and government balance sheets are tapped-out.  The problem is not too little CPI inflation, but the unavoidability of a pay-back era of sustained debt deflation. Yet the entire purpose of the Fed’s money printing regime—ZIRP, QE and all the rest—-is to force more debt into an economy that is already saturated. And as I have demonstrated elsewhere, the end result is that the Fed’s massive liquidity injections do not flow into the busted and exhausted Main Street credit channel, but only into the “Wall Street Bubble Channel” where they fund endless carry trades, speculations and eventually rip-roaring bubbles.

Nor has the picture changed since the 2008 financial crisis—that is, there exists no newly threatening deflationary bias, as shown above. Officially measured inflation continues to oscillate in a narrow band around 2% like it has since the late 1990s. The idea of missing the inflation target from below is just central bank jabberwocky—-a lie that actually harms the vast portion of Main Street America where incomes have lagged behind actual inflation for most of the 21st Century.

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