Subprime and Covid-19: black swans or symbols of an ineffective risk management approach ? The cost of applying the "normal law" to the health care system.

The global health crisis generated by the Covid-19 epidemic has highlighted the structural weaknesses of the risk management models of our contemporary societies, just as the subprime crisis had highlighted the flaws in the normative fences and predictive models used by the international banking system in 2008.

While half of the global population was confined, many commentators presented the new coronavirus as an unpredictable “black swan”, on the fringes of the world's “Gaussianity”.

So, is covid really the new black swan, in the sense of Taleb’s famous work ? It takes just a scratch to the surface of the “black swan” narrative, to figure out this is a flawed cover up attempt of the shortcomings of our healthcare systems and epidemic response and management organisations (just think of the epidemic plans not updated in the last 10 years, the lack of PPE in stocks, … all despite yearly documentations submitted to WHO with the goal of assessing national preparedness).

But why, you may ask, proposing a parallel between the banking system crisis and the health crisis at a time, when Europe, (and the western civilisations more broadly), is experiencing its second lockdown?