Jim Grant on dealing with a complex, uncertain future

The scale of government response is something new. So these things are unprecedented and so one must be very careful about drawing lessons from the past....

But for me, the lesson I have learned, or reinforced, is that … I’m going to quote a screenwriter from Hollywood... William Goldman, who I think wrote Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, apropos of the predictability of box-office receipts, William Goldman, from his lips fell one of the great quotations pertaining to all attempts at forecasting and prognostication.

“Nobody knows anything.”

We can know tendencies. We can observe patterns of behavior. We can project. So what the events of the past, the violent events of the past two weeks, have reinforced to me is the necessary humility to stay relatively diversified, relatively liquid and to choke down any thought that begins to resemble certitude. We can’t be immobilized by our ignorance of the future.

We can understand how complex the future is and how predictably, indeed predictably, it can surprise you.

~ Jim Grant, "Nobody Knows Anything," interview with Albert Lu of Sprott Media, March 24, 2020