I still vividly remember reading his Capital Ideas on my Washington DC apartment´s couch almost fifteen years ago, being introduced for the first time to finance theory through his easygoing prose

I know that we (I) have criticized theory and theorists quite intensely in these blogs (mostly for good reasons I believe); but if I am honest I must admit that it was precisely those accomplishments (initially heard though the Bernstein grapevine) what originally ignited my interest in high finance and what inspired me to try to become a derivatives person. I very much doubt that I would have worked on a tradig floor, written financial books, and be penning this blog if I had not stumbled upon Capital Ideas all those years ago.

The advantage I had at the time is that, in my lovely innocent naivete, I didn´t know that the theories were wrong and all I saw through Berstein´s eyes were intelligent highly-credentialed people building rabidly sophisticated financial spacecrafts that promised to make tons of dough for their skippers. It was Capital Ideas that first made me want to become a financial astronaut. So in a big sense, and perhaps rather paradoxically for those who read my not-so-innocent current musings, I am in debt to theory-revering Peter Bernstein.

Not sure what he would have made of Lecturing Birds or my myriad of theory-doubting articles, but I hope that he would have found my arguments honest and truth-seeking, even if possibly not entirely his cup of tea. What I most certainly hope is that he wouldn´t have been taken completely aback by them. After all, without his initial inspiration it is a safe bet that those arguments would have never been transformed into printed ruminations.

Courtesy of FT´s Gideon Rachman, one of the best explanations I´ve ever heard on why obscurantists took over the campus:

"I heard something similar recently from a friend who teaches economics at Oxford, who was bemoaning the fact that the course there is increasingly maths-based. His explanation is that maths-driven economics is so obscure and uninteresting to the outside world, that the academics who specialise in it can spend all their time in Oxford, taking over the faculty. By contrast, the economists whose work is empirical and expressed largely in English find themselves in demand in the outside world - and therefore do not have the time to block the forward march of the mathemeticians"

As Taleb says in the foreword to my Lecturing Birds, it is history written by the losers. The guys no one could care about end up dominating the department (and thus the outside world´s overall perception of the Economics discipline) PRECISELY because no one gives a damn about them. Darwinism in reverse! Those discarded by the world survive, those embraced by the world perish The freak no one wants to be around wins, precisely because of his unbearable freakishness. I mean, I totally concur. Have you ever met an orthodox, cloistered economist? Did you also have the feeling that you were talking to Frankenstein or some other type of weird creature? Someone very very freaky. Very very unpleasant.

No, I don´t mean nerds. Economists are not nerds (they wish). Bill Gates is a nerd, the Google guys are nerds, Steve Jobs is a nerd. The world needs nerds, we love them, we want them, we embrace them, we admire them, we envy them, we want to be like them. But who the heck would want to be like an orthodox cloistered economist, envy them? Orthodox economists are the wrong kind of geek. Completely noncreative, just exam-taking idiot savants who had no option but to get straight As because they could not do anything else with their lives. And they know that full well, thus their Torquemada-like repressive and persecutoty attitude towards those more creative, more dynamic, more wordly, more brilliant. And thus their incontrollable cynicism and to-the-bone intellectual corruption.

Best thing I ever did in my entire life was spend my Economics undergraduate years doing anything but studying (dogmatic, stubbornly orthodox) Economics

If Robin Soderling wins Roland Garros this weekend, that would truly be a Black Swan. Possibly more so than the fall of Lehman or October 87. In fact, by beating Nadal the Swede has already gained swany status. In tennis, the rare event is way way less probable than in the markets. A non-top tier player almost never reaches a Grand Slam final, let alone win one. There´s no crash, no meltdown, no outlier in tennis.

As a staunch Federer supporter I pray for normality to rule once more on the court. But I also fear that the Black Swan, having so insultingly dominated its more habitual financial surroundings for the past couple of years, may have grown bold enough to extend its supremacy into the Parisian clay.