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The UK empire blew up?? That's news to me... These are existential dilemmas. I suppose it all comes down, as usual, to utility and the subjective value you attach to various aspects of your lifestyle.

Well, I daresay that in a scenario where you have a revolution, you're gonna have to deal with rather more pressing issues than drawdowns. In fact, this could have been the logic. If you are reasonably certain that the "ruin" scenario is one where there are people with pitchforks and torches...

I think I need this to be explained a bit more to me... How precisely do you define "ruin" for Warren Buffett's unlevered PA account?

I don't quite see why you think it was the wrong thing to do for his PA. Obviously, I assume that it wasn't levered

As pointed out by others, this is entirely too simplistic. Is a barrel of crude or a gallon of gasoline "tangible and fungible"? Has the value of these stayed constant throughout the years? As to your comment about fiat currencies, someone better tell the Japanese about this right quick...

IMHO, Buffett's trades were genius on a whole variety of levels...

Local govt military? How do you think this is going to work in this day and age? Also, why can't you extrapolate from local govt working well to, say, state? If that works, why not extrapolate further? Those are theories... I am pretty sure that this is a rather difficult idea to implement...

It's an open question and I have looked at a lot of literature on the subject. It's sort of a question about whether Ricardian equivalence is a thing and it's actually quite complicated.

What about the police and the military?

With the caveat noted by the other poster (the CTD for ZN, aka TY, is actually 7y maturity), the very rough rule of thumb, as I mentioned in another thread, is that a move of roughly a full point is equivalent to arnd 11bps. You can use this quick and dirty calc to get a sense.

I can help you validate, if you need...

The common approach used nowadays is called "shifted lognormal", which you've mentioned. If you google it, you'll find lots of literature. There are lots of other techniques out there, mostly variants of SABR of one type or another.

Erm, a one-off catastrophic event, I agree, would not constitute a valid reason to cast doubt on the viability of a particular strategy. However, there's a difference between that and something which has persisted for well-nigh 10 years. As to admiring yourself in the mirror, I daresay nobody...

Hold on, man... Why you getting all excited about this? I am only saying that NNT's so-called strategy is half-baked. Heck, its various vague formulations don't even offer any interesting insights. Just my opinion, so feel free to disagree. Yes, I manage money for a living. And I don't do...

What should an investor do when the real yield on a 12m t-bill is negative? I am reasonably sure there ain't no tails that you can afford to buy when this happens (has been the case consistently, more or less, for the past 10+ years).

Everything in life is a balance, including this... So yet again, you won't find a lot of disagreement from me on this.

I have sympathy with the above, so you won't elicit much disagreement from me. I just thought that it was worth pointing out the natural limits to this logic. Pls take that in the spirit in which it was offered, no more and no less. I was actually responding to daal, tbh. My comment about...

That's 'cause NNT is a big picture ideas guy, who can't be bothered with trivial details... Those are for lesser intellects.

Sure, I have some sympathy with this logic, but let's stress-test it a bit to examine its practical limitations... Suppose I am a full time finance guy, but I have this dream of getting into medicine and actually helping people. To that end I am going to devote 10% of my time to medicine. Am...

Which bits do you disagree with? My point is that it's easy to say that one should invest in "maximally risky" securities. What are they, though? Venture capital? Private equity? Vanilla public mkt equities? As to TIPS, my point is precisely what you have mentioned. While you could argue...