Comment by tyre
15 hours ago
Covid was a black swan event. Unless we see something like the MBS collapse, the underlying economic weakness isn’t due to a such an acute root cause.
Not sure how comparable they are.
15 hours ago
Covid was a black swan event. Unless we see something like the MBS collapse, the underlying economic weakness isn’t due to a such an acute root cause.
Not sure how comparable they are.
I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
Not at all, people voted for this and the outcome was expected by people paying attention.
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
I did it a little more than a week following the election, but same. I even sold any ETFs with exposure to the US market I previously owned. People thought I was overreacting selling my VGRO, but the YTD returns for my ex-US portfolio are about 150% of what I could have expected with my old holdings and the peace of mind is priceless.
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300k votes in 3 swing states got Trump the electoral college in 2024, separate from him getting the popular vote.
In 2020 Biden won 3 swing states by 200k votes. Trump won in 2016 by 80k swing state votes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570973
It's the swing states that matter, not the popular vote.
> I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
That sounds pretty black swan to me, I'm guessing you never felt the need sheet any previous election? Being predictable and being unique are different things.
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Black swan is not quite right. It's move of an attempted phase change. It was possibly predictable, but definitely disruptive.
Speaking of impending capital controls, which countries aren’t likely to have them once the markets crash and globalism finally dies?
From the inside, this is nothing compared to COVID. 2025 feels a bit weird but to compare it with 2020 is laughable.
That view sounds like it's coming from a position of a white person, not married to a minority, not an immigrant. That describes me too. Software engineer, more secure economically.
Even people with visas or permanent residency, or who even look like they might be Hispanic are justifiably worried about a random car pulling them over and breaking their window. If you aren't aware or concerned, I call that oblivious or a denial of reality. Or privilege (edit: corrected spelling).
It's different in some ways of course than with covid.
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For (services) software people, 2020 was great: work from home, sky-high jobs demand (perhaps Zero-interest related), surging demand and revenue because by people were bored at home. Brick and mortar retail workers were screwed in 2020.
It is possible that 2025 could be the opposite, the software jobs market os already spooky for juniors, and could get much worse with an AI bust - guess what companies will do to show investors they are making up for written-off AI investments? A recession will lead to a drop in demand for online services like streaming, online shopping as people tighten their belts, upward ratcheting of subscription prices will only make the drop worse.
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Depends on your country, 2025 can be either the super easy life or the super hard life compared to 2020.
Black swan event should be unexpected. Trumps victory was within expected possibilities. It was also his second victory.
And his moves after winning were not unexpected either - he is doing what his opponents predicted he will do.
True. It must be added, that theres two wrenches in the machinery that transforms information into action currently.
Firstly - The average market behavior is average.
From experience, most people could not imagine anything of what was predicted, would come true. There is a large … debt of intellectual work that is being underwritten, allowing people to sell narratives which do not correspond to reality.
This is a direct result of a captured, unfair information environment.
As a result, the average behavior of the market is not pricing in these things, even if the plans were made clear.
A coronavirus causing a global pandemic at some point was even more expected though.
And even the erratic government reactions to the pandemic was not entirely unpredictable either to be fair.
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> Trumps victory was within expected possibilities.
While people felt that polls indicated a Harris victory and the margin of Trump's win was a surprise and a failure of forecasters, in reality it was always a toss-up in forecasts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for...
A contagious disease pandemic is not a black swan event. We have had many of them before and there are people whose day jobs are to model and plan for them.
Then almost anything is not a black swan by this logic.
Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them.
Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.
The virulence and adaptability of Covid makes it very much a black swan.
A black swan is something you didn't even imagine before encountering it. If you never imagined anything like COVID that's likely because your day job is unrelated to health emergency preparedness.
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It was the only such event in most people's lifetimes.
We've had, in this century, SARS, swine flu, MERS, ebola (× like 4), mpox (×2 apparently), Zika virus, and COVID-19. AIDS is a pandemic that's been going on since before I was born.
Pandemics and pandemic scares are really friggin' common.
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These are not mutually exclusive properties. Pandemic modellers do not predict exactly when a pandemic will emerge, they predict how a pandemic will evolve once it emerges. The actual emergence of a pandemic is still about as predictable as, say, a stock market crash or a war.
Trump fired many people whose job it was to plan for it. RFK Jr canceled vaccine research and various practices that will make it worse. I never imagined such idiocy on top of Trump's more likely racism policies. Future pandemics are much more likely now.
Tariffs can easily be turned off, and in December the supreme Court could rule that they majority of tariffs in place are illegal AND must be refunded.
According to Polymarket, there's a >50% chance that happens: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...
Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...
Don't forget that Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary and tariff fanatic, has his sons betting against them at his former firm.
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Loves Tariffs. His Former Investment Bank Is Taking Bets Against Them: https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...
And the senate probe into said conflict of interest: https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...
I can push that market to 100% with 10k usd so I wouldn’t weight that too strongly as evidence, although I agree on the tariffs part.
Can you explain how you reached that conclusion? If I'm reading the order book correctly, you'd need much more than 10k to remove all the opposing liquidity. And of course you can't assume that other participants will stand by idly, when you put in enough money to move the market away from what they believe is correct you might discover a lot more contra liquidity appears. So it might not stay where you want it for more than a moment.
> Covid was a black swan event
I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.
The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.
And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
Ah, so an asteroid obliterating NYC is not a black swan event because it's statistically likely to happen over long enough time horizons?
If you can forsee the event, but not predict the time, it's just as bad as an even you cannot forsee.
Exactly. The only thing that could be considered a black swan event is something foreshadowed or predicted by no one ever, even in fiction.
If all rivers suddenly turned to wine and killed all the crops? Not a black swan event, water gets turned to wine in the bible.
As you can see this attitude makes the phrase "black swan event" very useful.
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That's a grey swan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_swan
Sure, all probabilities go to 1 over a large enough time span. I don't think there's anything useful you can do with that information. Being early is the same as being wrong.
>> The only open question was when ... >> And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
If you can't tell us when, your predicition is useless.