Nassim Taleb, author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, joins CNBC on July 2, 2009 to discuss the system we know as our financial markets and what effects we can expect.

Don’t be fooled by a complex system… The system is very fragile. We’re talking about something that is deleveraging. You may have what they call green shoots, you may have temporary relief, but you’re still in a world that is breaking. And, that world should break. We’re gonna break, it’s gonna go.

If you look at nature, nature breaks anything that is too big. Not to reach interdependence, just to reach equilibrium. So anything that is fragile, eventually will crash. The system is very fragile, it is crashing. We’re in the middle of a crash.

So, if I was going to forecast something, I know it’s going to get worse, not better.

Black Swan defined:

“The really important events are rare and unpredictable. He [Taleb] calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, “all swans are white” had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.” (Chris Anderson, Author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More)

Watch the Interview: