The Blank Swan

There is  a new book, published in April, called The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. This is a clever title and the front photo is wonderful as well.

The book seems to be saying that financial market processes simply cannot be captured using the conventional notions of probability. The author writes in summary

The current crisis has led us to a conceptual impasse regarding the financial market. No prediction model can apply to the market …

Probability has to be discarded and a new category has to emerge instead, which will mediate contingency …

In fact, the market has nothing to do with Wall Street or with the investment banks. Market-making is a creative activity. The market is a category of thought that is independent of ideology. It replaces probability altogether and discarding the market, like the philosophers of the radical change claim we should do, is like discarding probability!

Not a very positive review from Reading the Markets, who found the book quite hard to read. There is some discussion on a Wilmott mailing list as well.