It’s at times like these when I turn to my old friend Mark Spitznagel, the professional contrarian and co-founder of Universa Investments, a hedge fund that allows other hedge funds to protect themselves from massive declines in the debt and equity markets. As my readers know, Spitznagel does well when others do poorly. He is Wall Street’s foremost practitioner of so-called “tail hedging,” an investment strategy he has perfected with The Black Swan author and mathematician Nassim Taleb—it involves buying cheap, far “out-of-the-money” options (and other) contracts to protect against the rare, cataclysmic plunge. It is, as he likes to say, the ultimate “insurance” policy.