Ken Posner, author of "Stalking the Black Swan", and Rep. Scott Garrett, (R)
New Jersey, discuss how to make the US less vulnerable to the next "black swan."
"Regulators need to be able to respond to a crisis without resorting to taxpayer
funds," Posner said.

By David Indiviglio

Death and taxes aren't the only things that are unavoidable: you can add asset bubbles to the list. We cannot escape bubbles, because they surprise us, argues Kenneth A. Posner in a blog post for the Harvard Business Review. That's partially right, but the problem goes even deeper.

Nassim Taleb hit the jackpot on timing his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. However, the book is more theoretical than practical insofar as actionable advice. In Kenneth Posner’s book, Stalking the Black Swan: Research and Decision Making in a World of Extreme Volatility,Ken moves past the proposition that black swans occur because humans posses biases and live in a universe packed with unknowns. Ken focuses his efforts on filling the void for all those Benjamin Graham acolytes who are interested in how black swans affect their beloved investment framework.

By Morgan Housel | The Motley Fool

Look at a long-term chart of just about anything related to the economy. Stock prices. Commodity prices. Housing prices. Interest rates. Money supply. Almost all show a similar trend -- relative stability for most of the post-World War II period and then … snap! … synchronized bedlam for the past decade. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan titled his memoir The Age of Turbulence. That's being gracious. The past decade has been the age of shock and awe.