Dressing the economic crisis up as an Act of God or an unforseeable natural disaster exonerates the disaster’s creators from blame. Taleb’s theory and book only became popular because they are being used as a flag of convenience for the creators of the credit crunch — i.e. the creators and main beneficiaries of the credit bubble.

Consequently, the three criteria you’ve given for identifying a black swan event are axiomatic, inviolable and self-referential (the third criteria requires acceptance of the first to be valid and the second is merely a get-out clause because if the impact is minor, no-one cares). Most importantly though, they are a distraction from the real issue that risks cannot be transferred and spread from the player without incurring a higher degree of systemic risk on the casino.

Which economists have known for a long, long time.

On a related note, the UK and US public have been sold and bought the idea that there is no such thing as a long term investment with reasonable returns for the provision of a pension. This too is bunkum. Banks regularly manage to provide their own senior employees confortable pensions in protected funds. The difference is that they don’t make as much money on them as they do from selling the higher risk, attractive margin products they sell to the rest of us.