"No Longer Tethered to the Fundamentals": A Nassim Taleb Protégé on How to Prepare for the Coming Market Crash

He thinks the yield hunger games, as I like to call what's been happening for the last decade, "makes people take crazy risks" because "interest rates and prices are wrong" and "otherwise wouldn't even clear the market. They are just absolutely wrong. But of course, central bankers think they know what the natural rate is and that it will all be fine. They think they've got it all figured out."

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He also thinks central bankers don't know how to stop the monster they have created. "I do not think that central bankers will ever be able to pull away from this," he explains. "They will never be able to ‘normalize' rates. In our lifetime, recessions and stock market crashes really have been instigated or started by central banks sort of pulling away the punch bowl. They raise rates and that has led to a slow down and ultimately has led to these crashes that we see. Every single one, that's how it's happened. But we've gone so far down the rabbit hole this time, I am absolutely convinced that that is not even on the table this time." He thinks central bankers are just testing the market when they suggest--as Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, did throughout 2018 when he raised short-term interest rates four times--that they wanted to try to return to letting supply and demand set the price of money, a position that he reversed in 2019 when he pivoted and then lowered interest rates. "They're not stupid," he says of central bankers. "They are reckless. But they are not stupid. And they realize that global economies are in a situation now where central banks can't pull away. And they're bluffing if they say they can."