Thanks to Jesse for capturing this speech by one of the precious metal and finance industries rising stars. Jesse's post can be found here. As an intro here is some of Ben Davies's opening remarks.....
Remarks by Ben Davies,
CEO, Hinde Capital, London
Economics has sought to blend epistemology, physics, mathematics, and behavioral science to try to measure uncertainty. They aim to try to predict when we might have an economic collapse, but no model has been created that manages this with much confidence, if any at all. How do you measure a risk that is unmeasurable?
No, there is nothing certain about economic predictions. Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. defense secretary, unwittingly declared it so at a NATO press conference in 2002, when he responded to a question on intelligence gathering:
"It's not the certainties that make life interesting; it's the uncertainties. There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the things we don't know we don't know."
Ridicule aside, I do think it was brilliant piece of polemic, irrespective of one's political persuasion. Without knowing it, Rumsfeld could actually be the poster child for a new line of economic thought that tries to draw parallels from physics -- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
In quantum physics this principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high accuracy........read in full
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