What advice might Taleb give the CDN Target and Tim Hortons franchisees who are thinking of “lawyering up”?

Someone once called me franchising’s black swan.

In science, you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

What does Nassim Nicholas Taleb define as a “sucker”:

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

Suckers think you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers. economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call a sucker problem.

I have no pecuniary interest in these schmozzles, only a few friends and their staff that I care about.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

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Franchising is ALL about Hidden structural risks

Nassim Taleb called the 2008 recession and wrote The Black Swan.

He argues that you should look at systemic risks (not individual, one-off risks).

• Look at the bridge’s engineer, not the last truck that drove across your collapsing franchise.
• Don’t look at the individuals, the brand, the area manager…

WikiFranchise.org was created to reveal those structural risks that cause 99% of the problems.

Roubini and Taleb on Nationalizing Banks

Anyone that throws cash at a franchise now (starts, renews), has lost their mind.

• Please note: No one invests in a franchise. You simply rent an alleged proven system and a trademark for some period of time.
• You may think you own something of value but that is a type of sleep-walking that you will awaken from.
• How long will you continue to feed a corpse (ie. continue to make payments into an already collapsing fraud)?

Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb know what they’re talking about, notwithstanding the pettiness of people like Paul Krugman. I did study political economy and using communism as a straw dog argument is unbecoming  anyone that calls themselves a professional economist.

• Unless, of course, bringing Monty Python in was Herr Krugman’s idea of a joke.
• That may be a sense of humour not shared by the +500,000 U.S. laid off workers last month.

Nationalize banks (guaranteeing bad debts and a  “bad bank” won’t work).

1. Don’t reward known thieves and reckless risk-takers.
2. Cash is King (keep what you’ve got).
3. Compensation IS the source of the problem.
4. It’s only started (massive deleveraging still to happen).
5. The recession could be 10 years long.
6. Obama’s bailout plan is a BUST.

And don’t listen to the media morons.