The conference at the Forum Karlín was opened by the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Petr Fiala. “The world balance is facing various upheavals at the moment. We can argue about taxes or the budget, but these debates are incomparable to the main task of the state, which is security,” the prime minister said.

One of the keynote speakers was former longtime derivatives trader and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is known to the public as the author of the world bestseller Black Swan, which was named one of the 12 most influential books by the British newspaper The Sunday Times since The Second World War. The book describes the phenomenon of unexpected events, called black swans, for which society cannot prepare precisely because they are totally unpredictable.  To some, perhaps surprisingly, Taleb did not refer to the recent coronavirus pandemic as a black swan. “Thanks to globalization, the world could have prepared better for this pandemic, it was predictable,” Taleb said in the introduction. When asked where the next black swan might come from, he says, it depends on your point of view. But it regards the financial sector or the real estate market as fragile.

The author of the world’s bestsellers and a former trader in financial derivatives also talked about the current economic conflicts, mentioning in the context of the connectivity of the current world that it is the close interconnectedness of economies that helps peaceful coexistence. He cited the world’s two largest economies as an example. “The US and China are already so interconnected that they would hurt each other if they tried to do more harm to each other.”

In the last part of the discussion, he directed criticism towards cryptocurrencies, about which he has traditionally been very negative. “They’re merely an alternative, and they don’t carry anything positive. People will soon lose interest in cryptocurrencies, because they are fragile and only a few people manipulate the market, and that may be a big problem for the future,” Taleb said.

Czech entrepreneur and majite