# Quote — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

> Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

- Author: [Nassim Nicholas Taleb](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb.md)
- Book: [The Black Swan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan.md)
- Page: 225
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable_(2007)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/globalization-creates-interlocking

## More from this book

> There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

p. 142 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/there-is-no-effective.md)

> History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/history-is-opaque.md)

> Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

p. 15 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/categorizing-is-necessary.md)