Nassim Taleb on the "Everything in Moderation" Fallacy and the Hidden Cancer of Debt:
> I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, 'virtue lies in moderation.' Well, for a long time that was the ideal; mediocrity, in that sense, was even deemed golden. All-embracing mediocrity.
> Debt comes as a product of overconfidence. The more confident you are, the less it makes sense ... to issue equity and dilute your profits and the more it makes sense to borrow. The problem ... is that we humans cannot be trusted with knowledge because we tend to be overconfident ... and that's sort of the message of the Black Swan.
[T]he religions ... Judaism, the Ecclesiastes, [don't] like debt. ... Christianity early on did not like debt, and Islam banned debt. It's not without a reason and then I looked and I realized that you had ... turmoil coming from debt from Babylonian times.
The Romans had problems with debt and ... a lot of wars caused by debt. So debt was not necessarily a good thing. Now people say "Well, in moderation ...," but we don't know what moderation means. If you ... asked someone in Lehman brothers ... two years ago they would have said "Oh, we have a moderate level of debt." We don't know what it means. So we have to watch out. Debt is something that is very toxic and can hit you very quickly.