The events that reshape economies the most are the ones nobody saw coming

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "black swan" events are rare, extreme, and seemingly impossible to predict, yet feel obvious and inevitable in hindsight, think major financial crashes or sudden technological upheavals. He argued that standard risk models badly underestimate how often these events occur because they assume a world far tidier than the one we live in. His core advice wasn't to try predicting black swans, but to build portfolios robust enough to survive being wrong.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable — Random House, 2007
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