Dec 9, 2008

Nassim Taleb on hedge funds

I think the hedge funds that we have today, a lot of them are going to disappear and they deserve to disappear. A lot of them never made a penny for their clients, they're taking a lot of hidden risks - they looked good, but in fact they were hiding a lot of hidden risks. But I think there's a role, hedge funds to finance companies, by mature hedge funds - those will survive. You're going to have, of course, survival of a different class of people from the ones who thrived during the Greenspan-Bernanke era. So you will have hedge funds taking risks... but then... society - the responsible people - is not there to bail them out. They'll take risks, but the class of risks they'll be taking is going to be more on the equity side than on the debt side.

~ Nassim Taleb, "A conversation about economics with Nassim Taleb," Charlie Rose, December 3, 2008

No comments: