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

It’s neither useful nor correct to characterize final week’s banking disaster as a “black swan” occasion.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb launched the time period black swan in his 2007 guide referred to as “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Black swans within the inventory market are sudden, terrible, unpredictable and very uncommon—corresponding to a market crash. They aren’t, as Taleb complained in an interview with the New Yorker a number of years in the past, “any bad thing that surprises us.”

The…