We are not the first recipient of the correspondence either, it having first been publicized by Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal two years ago. It looks like nothing has changed, except for the date. Not sure if Mr. Taleb started taking emails sometime after January 2011 and now, or if the date just keeps changing and getting pushed back. (And we'll probably never know, because Mr. Taleb won't answer our emails.)

Below is the auto-reply, along with our initial query, for the sake of transparency. We hope you enjoy it this as much as we do.

AUTOREPLY

(Please ignore this message if you are a personal friend or engaged in an ongoing
correspondence).

Dear correspondent;

I am currently disengaged from the rest of the world (until November 2012).

I had to stop replying to emails outside of the strictly personal (friends, family, citizens of Amioun, etc.), except for extremely important/urgent matters.

Please note that, except for emergencies & appointments,  I reply to mails with an equivalent frequency to that of classical letters.

(REQUESTS: Also note that 1) I no longer do media interviews (except those scheduled by publishers), 2) can no longer endorse books, 3) do not participate in documentary films, 4) will not give lectures in Asia, Australia, and other places entailing severe jetlag, etc.)

I apologize for the inconvenience.

On Sep 29, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Matt Chaban <mchaban@observer.com> wrote:

> Nassim,
>
> Hi. I'm working on a story about Rich Marin. Not sure if you worked with him at Bankers Trust, but if so, I'd love to get your impression of him. Not sure you've heard, but that giant ferris wheel in Staten Island, the biggest in the world, that is Rich Marin's latest venture, after Bear and his stint in real estate. Working on a profile of him, so it would be great to get your insights if you know him. And/or if you know anyone better to talk to, that would be great. Thanks so much!
>
> Sincerely,
> Matt Chaban
>
> Real Estate Editor
> The New York Observer

"Are you going?" Mr. Stiglitz asked.

Mr. King, a man who looks like his name should be Stamp Brooksbank or Delillers Carbonnel, apologetically nodded his silver head. He said that Mr. Stiglitz, whose work he's been keeping up with, should let him know when he's in Britain. Mr. Stiglitz, wearing a scratchy beard and a blazer with dandruff on the shoulders, turned. "Laura?"

"Nice to see you!" said Laura D. Tyson.

"You, too," said Mr. Stiglitz, who succeeded her as chair of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers when she left to become director of the National Economic Council.

"How've you been?" she said. A dreamy song by Beach House, the Baltimore duo, played outside, in the reception with Caribbean empanadas and assorted arepas.

"I've been fine!" said Mr. Stiglitz. "How are you? This is kind of a fun thing!"

"Oh," said Ms. Tyson, holding a Naked juice, "even better than I thought it was going to be."

It was the end of the first day of The Economist's Buttonwood Gathering. This was only its second year, and it had another day to go, but the auditorium already had that brawny and lacquered feeling certain spaces in New York City get when very important people are talking about very important things.

THE CONFERENCE BEGAN filling up Monday around noon, as a Fox News van idled outside, a few feet from a small group of protestors rallying against credit card rates. Justin Hendrix, The Economist's events chief, came onstage for an introductory pep talk. "I would like," he said, "everyone to stand up, if you will, and introduce yourself to someone you don't know." An executive in a suit with a name tag that said he was Arvind Rajan of Prudential was not in the mood to talk to a reporter. Mr. Rajan was previously at Citigroup, where he was the global head of structured credit research, and where he quite literally wrote the book on CDOs, The Structured Credit Handbook.

Economist editor John Micklethwait came on next. Quoting Alfred Marshall's 19th-century line about the dull heavy calm after panic and failure, he described himself as a paranoid optimist. His thick hair swooped down from left to right over his brow, above what will one day be stately English jowls. He introduced his U.S. economics editor, Greg Ip, who asked if states here could suffer crises in the not distant future. "There will be a terrible problem," Warren Buffett said to the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission this summer about municipal bonds, "and then the question becomes will the federal government help."

It's February 2013, Mr. Ip said, setting the scene, and a state called New Jefferson, a version of California with chunks of New York thrown in, is two days away from defaulting on a $1.5 billion debt. "Ladies and gentleman, the Buttonwood Gathering is pleased to present the fiscal crisis simulation scenario."

"Alrighty!" Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and Citi chairman, said, walking onstage to the big seat in between three on each side. "Good! Ha," he said, looking to no one in particular at his right and smiling, excited. Mr. Rubin was the simulation's director of the National Economic Council. "Well, let me start by thanking all of you for getting together so quickly. We have an immediate issue." Mr. Rubin was really into it. "Today, as you know, is Monday. On Wednesday, they have a $1.5 billion debt come due," he said. "The president asked us to get together to discuss what to do."

A day earlier, The Times' Frank Rich had called Mr. Rubin one of the great villains of the financial crisis, a man who made $115 million encouraging Citi to ramp up high-risk investments after years of leading deregulation that made the risk possible. Mr. Rubin really had been the council's chief under Mr. Clinton; when he left to lead the Treasury, Mr. Clinton replaced him with Ms. Tyson, who was onstage playing secretary.

His deputy was played by Jay Powell, George H. W. Bush's undersecretary of the Treasury for finance, and then a partner at the Carlyle Group. As he talked, Mr. Rubin pushed his glasses up onto his brow and started to take notes. He checked something off with a big whoosh of the arm and then looked at Mr. Powell, looked at the audience and tore out a page from his pad. He wrote on it, tightened his mouth, finished writing and put it under his stack of papers. Then he leaned back to look offstage, took a sip from his mug, looked at his deputy, looked away and jotted down another note. He crossed his arm and scratched his bottom lip with his top row of teeth. He folded his hands below his nose, thoughtfully.

Everyone else was basically still. Ms. Tyson sat between Mr. Rubin and George W. Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, who was playing the chief of staff. He was next to the Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard, who was playing the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which he'd also been under the younger Bush. (That was Ms. Tyson's and then Mr. Stiglitz's post, too.) It was like watching popes do a nativity play.

There were pieces of faux-news delivered onstage by an aide in a yellow tie. The governor had gone public with the crisis, trying to force the federal government to help. If we don't provide support, Mr. Rubin explained, we risk a "Lehman-plus." If we do, we risk moral hazard. "This is a big deal, you've got a horrendous dilemma," he said. "I don't know if we should blink."

"I don't know if we have to blink, "said Mr. Hubbard.

Blinking was nearly a foregone conclusion: People like these would never let something important fail, even when playing make-believe. Eventually, a 30-day loan was decided on, but with heavy strings attached. At the finale, breaking character, Mr. Rubin told the audience that the exercise should make them appreciate the crisis' decision makers. "Seriously," he said, deadpan, pursing his lips so that his tongue pushed out slightly between them.

Afterward, Mr. Powell, who helped write the simulation's scripted sections, said that the point of the whole thing was to get people thinking about what we can do to avoid getting ourselves in another situation where the choice is between evils. "Because when it happens, when the system is really collapsing, policy makers don't have a choice."

Mr. Ip walked onstage and asked why management and creditors emerged mostly unscathed from the real-life bailouts. "It's not entirely true that all of the bond holders and all the Wall Street fat cats escaped," said Mr. Bolten. "That's just the political impression." He said that that very question had its own chapter in President Bush's new memoir. "Available November 9," he said, "from Crown Books."

"I can't tell you how ridiculous I find this to be," a redheaded woman in the audience said. "Why not give us the clear message that there will not be a bailout?"

"That would be another way to go," Ms. Tyson said. "No money ever." Mr. Rubin picked at his lip.

MR. KING, THE ENGLISH governor, came on next, which, as it turned out, was amazing timing. "Banks should be financed much more heavily by equity rather than short-term debt, much, much more equity; much, much less short-term debt. Risky investments cannot be financed in any other way," he said. "Of all the many ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today."

Buttonwood's keynote speech is called the Bagehot Lecture, after the 19th-century English businessman. "The present crisis dwarfs anything Bagehot witnessed," he said. "Bank of America today accounts for the same proportion of the U.S. banking system as all of the top 10 banks put together in 1960."

Mr. King did not speak for long. "The real failure was a lapse into hubris," he said. "There was an inability to see through the veil of modern finance to the fact that the balance sheets of too many banks were an accident waiting to happen."

Afterward, three of the most important men in banking, mustachioed PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian, unsmiling Deutsche Bank star Anshu Jain and the slight S&P president Deven Sharma, were outshined by Philippa Malmgren, a former adviser to George W. Bush. "The sharks are circling," she said. The men wore matching dark suits over light shirts, but she had what looked like a leather skirt and black heels. "The whale is there, and the whale is the United States."

They were followed by Citi chief executive Vikram Pandit. He opened with the idea that the new global banking rules known as Basel III "don't go far enough." It was eventually clear he meant exactly the opposite. Because of the new restrictions, he threatened, banks will take "deposits from mom and pop" and "lend to big businesses." Ed Skyler, the Bloomberg aide who left for Citi this year, stood against the left aisle, looking very serious, and recorded the speech on his iPhone's Voice Memos application, although he also seemed to be following along with a printed version of the speech. Nearby, a blond woman in a frilly shirt spoke into her wrist, very quietly.

"I do think we should end too big to fail, it's absolutely the right thing to do," said Mr. Pandit, whose bank, Mr. Rubin's former place, is usually the first example of cross-border giants that are still impossible to wind down. "It's being looked at right now."

After the speeches, an usher went through the audience and held on to a microphone while questions were asked. The analyst Mike Mayo pulled it away. "I heard that I was shut out from meeting with Citigroup," he said into his microphone. "And that was similar to the experience I had in 2002," he said. There were minor problems with crotchety questions a day later, when, among other things, Mr. Stiglitz spoke with the billionaire Wilbur Ross; the Treasury deputy Neal Wolin spoke with RBC CEO Gordon Nixon; and Jim Chanos talked with Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach.

"Mike! Good to see you again," Mr. Pandit said. He politely suggested that maybe the other members of the audience were probably interested in other matters. "And you are always welcome into Citigroup anytime you want."

Ms. Tyson asked about what's known as the shadow banking system. "We'd like to see more of that addressed," said Mr. Pandit.

Nassim Taleb, the trader and N.Y.U. professor known for the book The Black Swan, came on next. "Can we do something about these lights? I'll say the truth, don't worry, but I can't concentrate with these lights. Excuse me," he said from the podium to a large man who was possibly a lingering member of Mr. Pandit's detail, "Can you do something about these lights?" The lights on him dimmed.

"I'm quite disgusted at these discussions," he said. "We can't change humans, make them less greedy. We can't make them less stupid." He spoke about a new theory called anti-fragility, and, like Mr. King, spoke furiously about leverage. "You have the illusion of going faster, but the probability of crash is so high that you'll never get there," he said.

Afterward, the day ended like it began: theatrically. Two white rappers in fake mustaches battled as John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek. They rhymed "ever so pious" with "confirmation bias," "psychology's role" with "fearless and bold" and "ex-post simulation" with "real estimation."

Mr. Stiglitz grinned in the front row. Mr. Micklethwait watched from an aisle, beaming so broadly that his chin stuck forward.

"We thank The Economist for bringing us here," said Hayek.

"And to the lobby for cocktails," said Keynes, "some wine and some beer."

mabelson@observer.com

The biggest intraday drop in the history of the Dow, nearly 1,000 points, didn't happen because of a calamity: No monuments had been burned and not a single colossal European country had defaulted. It just came. And then it went. The Dow was up above 10,500 by the end of the afternoon, and then back to 10,800 on Monday, after a trillion-dollar bailout package for Greece was announced. "We're on to the next freaky thing," a banking executive said this week, less than seven days after the Great Fall.

Is a terrifying and bizarrely opaque 1,000-point free fall another thing that is just going to happen on Wall Street every now and then? If so, will we know why? More pointedly, have we learned anything from the terrifying and bizarrely opaque events of the past year and a half? "We hope to be able to provide investors and the public with more information soon on the events that may have contributed to this volatility," the S.E.C. chairman, Mary Schapiro, told a Congressional subcommittee Tuesday, "but we should recognize that it will take time to fully analyze the data."

The night before, in a corner of the joint book party he threw for the scholars Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini, the hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin did not want to bother parsing the stock market's Thursday collapse. "Why did it fall on Wednesday? Why did it fall on Friday?" said Mr. Griffin, who is 68 slots ahead of Mr. Ross on this year's Forbes billionaires list. "People make up stories after the fact."

JAMES GORMAN, MORGAN Stanley's new chief executive, was alone in his 40th-floor office after a Thursday lunch when he saw the market wobbling. He called Suzanne Charnas, his head of investor relations. "Oh, God, what's happening?" they said. Mr. Gorman thought it must have been some kind of mistake.

Vikram Pandit was in a meeting at Citi headquarters. Another executive interrupted with the news. The chief executive stayed to finish the meeting, and then he collected staff in his office to talk. Steve Schwarzman was at Blackstone's annual conference with limited partners at the Waldorf Astoria. A senior executive at AIG had all-day meetings. "I was in a cocoon all day," the executive said. "Sometimes it's good to be in cocoon."

At 2:30, just before the crash, a former principal at Long Term Capital Management was walking out of a lunch with a hedge fund manager when he saw that the Dow was down a couple of hundred of points. "Not your best," he said. He went to another meeting, which lasted until 3:15, after the fall and rise. On his iPhone, he checked a couple of his stocks. One that normally trades for around $3.50 was down 20 cents. "And I took a look at the low, and the low was down 75 cents. And I said, 'No, that's a misprint. Then I looked at other stocks.'" He realized what had happened while standing in the street.

It was not particularly loud or chaotic at the suburban Kansas City headquarters of BATS, the third-largest exchange in the country, right behind New York's and Nasdaq. "Is it Greece? What's going on?" Joe Ratterman, the CEO, asked aloud.

At Goldman Sachs, gossip was floating around the investment management division that Citigroup had caused the fall with some sort of mammoth trading error. Silly Citigroup! An executive at another bank heard the same thing and told a newspaper reporter. CNBC heard it, too, and put up a story saying that a Citi trader may have inadvertently pressed a "b" for billion, not a "m" for million, in a trade that may or may not have involved Procter & Gamble. This was given a name: It was called the fat-finger theory. And the fat-fingered investigation had a focus: CNBC said there was a strange sale of 16 billion E-mini S&P 500 futures, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

In Chicago, alongside the S&P 500 futures pit, a 38-year-old squawk-box broadcaster named Ben Lichtenstein, a man with a stadium-size voice of gravel and amphetamines, narrated the dive as it happened. "Guys this is probably the craziest I've seen it down here!" he shrieked. On a recording that was immediately passed around on Web sites like Zero Hedge, he narrated the fall number by number. It was pandemonium. "This will blow people out in a big way that you won't even believe!" he screamed in between a stream of numbers. After work, he went to his daughter's soccer practice, then his son's baseball practice, and then went out with a client.

THE NEXT MORNING, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange confirmed that Citigroup's activity did not appear to be irregular or unusual. And by late Friday, the Obama administration had sent out word that a fat finger did not, in fact, start the biggest collapse in Dow history.

So what did? Traders had been itchy about the Greek debt crisis and the British election-but nothing astounding had happened that afternoon with either. Was it hackers or terrorists? Ms. Schapiro said Tuesday that it didn't look like it.

The New York Stock Exchange blamed Nasdaq. Nasdaq blamed the New York Stock Exchange. Then Nasdaq blamed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Was it the machines? On Friday, both The Journal and The Times had articles about high-frequency trading, the gargantuan but relatively new industry that uses algorithms to buy and sell. When the market falls to a certain level, both articles said, high-speed firms' computers are programmed to sell automatically to protect against more and more losses. The firm Tradebot Systems, another enormous Kansas City-based firm, even said that its computers shut down entirely. A "computer glitch at even just one firm could trigger a wave of selling that sets off huge losses across financial markets," a Journal story about the New York Stock Exchange's upcoming 400,000-square-foot high-speed hub in suburban New Jersey said last year. The new hub was nicknamed Project Alpha.

By Sunday, Senator Chris Dodd was on Face the Nation, complaining about "very fancy computers that can move in microseconds." At the book party the next night, Mr. Griffin, the hedge fund manager, held up a glass of Champagne with Maria Bartiromo to toast the Bremmer and Roubini books. "I think that it's much easier," he said in a conversation afterward, "to try and blame faceless computers."

The next day, another Journal article said that a $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts from a hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, famous for the book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, "may have played a key role in the stock-market collapse." It did not mention that the paperback version of Mr. Taleb's book was released that morning.

mabelson@observer.com