“Greece’s economic ills are a trivial menace to the global economy compared with the much graver threat posed by a heavily-indebted and seemingly immobile U.S. government, author Nassim Taleb said Monday. ‘There is a serious problem in the U.S.,’ Taleb said after speaking at a business conference here. ‘The U.S. deficit is around $1.5 trillion. It’s far more dangerous than Greece.’”

“Mr. Taleb said investors and government officials around the world are unwise to focus so much on Greece when the real ‘elephant in the room’ is the U.S.”

Mr. Taleb keeps the metaphors coming (“Greece is peanuts” The U.S.? “A time bomb.”) throughout his comments.

Curiously, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, proceeds to describe the U.S. in rather less dramatic terms.

“This is not an insoluble problem,” he said of the U.S. debt crisis. “You can fix it with some fiddling here and there. But you need the will to do it. And you need consciousness about the importance of debt. I don’t see that. Politicians are good at getting elected, not at solving problems like this.”