Nassim Taleb, the former options trader who predicted the 2008 financial crisis in his bestseller "The Black Swan", has described the coronavirus pandemic as a "white swan".

In an interview Monday, March 30 on Bloomberg Television, Taleb criticized the $2 trillion economic relief package signed into law in the United States as a bailout for investors and for companies that drained cash or levered up to buy back stock.

What irks Taleb most of all is the suggestion that the virus pandemic is a "black swan" event, a statistical outlier so rare no one could have predicted or prevented it. His 2007 book of the same name flagged globalisation as reason enough to anticipate a "very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet."

"We've had black swans -- September 11 [2001] was definitely a black swan," he said. "This was a white swan."