The Bob Rubin trade

Monday, May 8th, 2017

Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the Bob Rubin trade:

[A] system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game will eventually blow up and fix itself that way. We will see numerous such examples.

For instance, bank blowups came in 2008 because of the hidden risks in the system: bankers could make steady bonuses from a certain class of concealed explosive risks, use academic risk models that don’t work (because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke uncertainty after a blowup, some unseen and unforecastable Black Swan, and keep past bonuses, what I have called the Bob Rubin trade. Robert Rubin collected one hundred million dollar in bonuses from Citibank, but when the latter was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check. The good news is that in spite of the efforts of a complicit Obama administration that wanted to protect the game and the rent-seeking of bankers, the risk-taking business moved away to hedge funds. The move took place because of the over-bureaucratization of the system. In the hedge fund space, owners have at least half of their net worth in the funds, making them more exposed than any of their customers, and they personally go down with the ship.

People don’t learn when they they are not the victims to their own mistakes:

Skin in the Game reduces, sometimes even eradicates, the following differences that arose as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, the practical and the theoretical, expert and pseudoexpert, entrepreneur and bureaucrat, Coventry and Brussels, the concrete and the abstract, the ethical and the legal, the genuine and the cosmetic, scholarship and academia, democracy and governance, science and scientism, politics and politicians, love and money, the spirit and the letter, Cato the Elder and Barack Obama, quality and marketing, commitment and signaling, and, centrally, the collective and the individual.

But, to this author, is mostly about justice, honor, and sacrifice as the core of human existence.

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