Mark Hulbert: Why the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was not a black swan

United States

It’s neither helpful nor accurate to characterize last week’s banking crisis as a “black swan” event.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the term black swan in his 2007 book called “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Black swans in the stock market are sudden, awful, unpredictable and extremely rare—such as a market crash. They are not, as Taleb complained in an interview with the New Yorker several years ago, “any bad thing that surprises us.”

The…