White House senior adviser Jared Kushner called President Donald Trump a “black swan” on Monday — a reference to the shorthand term for unexpected and impactful events — after CNN’s Van Jones asked Kushner for his 2018 midterm elections predictions in an interview at “Citizen by CNN” festival.
“Are we going to beat you in the midterms?” Jones asked. “Democrats?”
“I don’t know, I mean, I see mixed data,” Kushner replied. “The data that we look at shows that it’s all about the turnout models. So I think people who have different turnout models will show different things, but one thing I’ve learned is I wouldn’t bet against Trump. He’s a black swan. He’s been a black swan all his life. And I just see, in politics and business, I just don’t like betting against him.”
Definition of black swan
"An event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that would be extremely difficult to predict. This term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Mr Taleb is a finance professor and former Wall Street trader.
He took his title from the shock that Europeans experienced when they discovered black swans in Australia. Until then, their data told them that all swans were white, so the discovery was unexpected.
A black swan in markets is an event that has not occurred in the past, thus rendering useless risk management models based on historic data. Such a risk model would assume that all swans were white.
Mr Taleb suggests his idea has been misunderstood. The problem, he told the CFA Institute in 2008, is not that black swans occur often. Rather, it is that they have truly catastrophic and unpredictable effects when they do happen, and so risk managers should concentrate on guarding against them."
Yeah, I’ll buy that.
Let’s hope he’s more the Great Pumpkin.
Did Jones remind Kush that his supposed Black Swan ISN’T on the ballot for the midterms?
It’s all about how the different models factor the continued effectiveness of Russian interference.
“Catastrophic” being the key feature that marks DT as a player who has “been a black swan all his life.”
That only applies in the literal real world. In the Trumpistan world of alternative facts the Con-in-Chief told his crowd of sycophantic worshipers in Southaven, MS that “I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me. I want you to vote. Pretend I’m on the ballot.”