Liz Hoffman > Quotes

“The economist who coined it, Nassim Taleb, assigned three characteristics to “black swan” events: They are rare, they are extreme, and once they have passed, hindsight tends to rationalize them.”
― Liz Hoffman, Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on theBrink

“Black swan” is a ubiquitous term in economics. It comes from a historical belief that all swans were white, which held for centuries until colonizing Europeans stumbled onto Australia and found black swans among the continent’s menagerie of strange creatures. Adopted more recently by economists, the term is now a warning: The most dangerous and costly crises come when something that has never happened before—something that everyone has assumed could never happen—happens.”
― Liz Hoffman, Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on theBrink