More after the jump.
From the Financial Times:
My week at the end-of-the-world summit
Dizzyingly tiny numbers, late-night parties, cold-war secrets: Jemima Kelly attends the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies
The past feels present in Erice. It’s there in the steep, cobbled streets that make it impossible to wear anything resembling an elegant pair of shoes; it’s there in the medieval cloisters that we eat beneath each night; and it’s there, constantly, in the chatter between the venerable attendees of the physics summit that I’ve come to attend in this most beautiful corner of Sicily. “This restaurant is nothing like it used to be — I once had a spaghetti aglio e olio here that I dreamt about for years but this pasta is so-so.” “Your colleague who used to come — is he still alive?” “Were you here in the years that Teller attended?”
History also takes pride of place on the welcome pack I’m given when I arrive at the San Rocco monastery, my home for the week, after a terrifying taxi ride up the winding road that leads to this mountain-top town, perched some 750m above the Tyrrhenian Sea. The cover picture is of a 1993 summit where the attending luminaries included four Nobel Prize winners plus Pope John Paul II, Edward Teller — the “father of the H-bomb” — and Antonino Zichichi.I am reminded of a re-post from January of this year:
Zichichi, generally referred to here as “Nino”, is an 89-year-old Sicilian particle physicist whose close ties with the Vatican and regular appearances on Italian TV have made him as close to a celebrity as a scientist can be in his native country. He doesn’t have a Nobel Prize, “but he’s the kind of person you’d think would have one”, a physicist tells me.
He’s also the founder of the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, the body that has been running these summits in Erice — billed as International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies — for almost four decades. The annual event had been described to me as a place scientists go to discuss existential threats to mankind or, to put it another way, the end of the world. And in earlier years, it was just that: it was set up in 1981 in response to the cold war, and, in those days, went by the ominous-sounding International Seminar on Nuclear War.
The agenda was broadened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as fears of a nuclear holocaust subsided. These days, the summit seems to span a mind-boggling array of categories that have been deemed “planetary emergencies”, from “the science of complex networks” to “experimental evidence for complexity” and “complexity at the fundamental level”.....MUCH MORE
Tips And Tricks For Investing In 'End of the World Funds'
Alternative title: Where in the world is Dan McCrum?
Mr. McCrum stepped up to the plate as FT Alphaville's editor when Ms Kaminska was away and in addition to getting off some pretty good headlines—and an endearing glee when one of his editee's posts went over 100 comments—would also write stuff. We haven't seen his byline in a while, so here's a flashback:
First posted June 5, 2018
Tips And Tricks For Investing In 'End of the World Funds'
As unauthorized representatives for Long or Short Capital's End of the World Puts this is an area of profound interest from which we have gleaned some insight:
1) Should the world end, collecting on your bet can be a challenge. Know your counterparty!As amateur scribblers we are adherents of the WaPo's Joel Aschenbach's dictum:
And possibly more important, demand collateral.
2) The swings in end of the world product prices can be dramatic.
3) Prognosticators have predicted 100,000 of the last 0 termination events.
...When in doubt, go with the most hysterical headline.
(Rule one of blogging is that the End Of The World will be good for page views.)
Although not a journalist I am affected by what they do, usually on a minute-to-minute basis, which gives one a real incentive to have what is admittedly a fuzzy (vague, incomplete etc) overview of what they-and other storytellers-are thinking about.
So I read stuff.
Last seen in 2017's "The end of the world is a growth industry."With that, we'll turn it over to the professionals. Here's Dan McCrum writing at FT Alphaville:
Algebris has launched an 'end of the world fund'....
*****
We are not fans of the typical black swan fund, even as a hedge. Like
triple-leveraged inverse ETF's the concept sounds good but having the
market's historical upward bias grinding against you can get wearying.
Some day this will change but in the meantime here are some thoughts on
Nassim Taleb:More on Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb as a Money Manager
The day the Wall Street Journal broke the news of "Taleb Makes Hyperinflation Bet and Why You Might Want to Be Skeptical" there was a minor kerfuffle about a claim “...made $20 billion for our clients, half a billion for the Black Swan fund", reported in the British GQ. I didn't understand how that could be and instead chose to focus on his Empirica Kurtosis fund's performance.
We've been tracking Mr. Taleb for quite a while and the general summation is an ad I was going to write for him:
"Here at The PseudoProfound Group, we believe..."Climateer Line of the Day: The Humble Mr. Taleb Edition
I was reminded of something Nassim Taleb said a few years ago:
CNNMoney: Did your personal portfolio benefit or suffer from the subprime crisis?
Taleb: I prefer not to answer that, as I am trying to avoid talking about my nonintellectual activities.
And now I can't stop laughing. ...
