Catastrophic Risk Quotes
Credit default swaps were in large part responsible for the melt down of the economy of 2008 and the Great Recession thereafter. A credit default swap was one of the favorite derivatives that became popular. Is an insurance policy that a company will pay off its bonds and not go bankrupt. It is a cross between an insurance mechanism and a stock exchange type security mechanism, and through heavy lobbying, escaped any kind of regulation. It cost a company no money to write a credit default swap, and they were paid to do so. As long as business and the economy was good, it was a terrific business but there was no way of ever knowing how much risk they were taking. So companies who wrote credit default swaps did not have to have the money to pay to back them up. When that happened in 2008, even the largest insurance company in the world collapsed because of the risk of having to pay the credit default swap and the U. S. Government had to take over the insurance company. In 2010, the Obama administration passed a financial reform bill that began to regulate credit default swaps. Buffet, the American who had made the most money in financial securities, realized the great danger not only to the company, but to the entire national economy. Most of the rest of the financial institutions, could make large amounts of money without have to have much capital as long as things went well. So credit default swaps began to exceed the other financial instruments in activity. Neither the Federal Reserve or the other government regulatory agencies chose to regulate these risky instruments nor even to require that they be publicly disclosed -- See {637987}, {637986} and {637992}.
On May 11, 1998, India exploded a nuclear bomb. The CIA and the NSA were caught flatfooted. They had no inkling of such an event, and found out about it when the Indian Government announced it. The entire world balance of power had shifted and the United States had no warning despite the fact that the Indian Prime Minister and other Officials had publicly stated that they were working on a nuclear bomb. The American Warning System had failed totally. That is what prompted McCarthy’s statement. However, many key people at the CIA were angry at their old colleague for so dramatically drawing attention to what they regarded as a slip up. Later, when she returned to the CIA, there was much contention and she was fired by Republican Director Porter Goss, but the details of the circumstances have never been made public.
He was never known for his environmental concerns yet there he was, in front of most.
There had been so much nuclear activity—military and civilian—that he thought it inevitable, either by intention or accident, that there would be some catastrophes. Chernobyl and the crash of a nuclear bomb equipped plane in Spain destroyed the two areas for years thereafter proved him prescient but fortunately none of the “incidents” were bad enough to affect millions of people significantly although the damage of Chernobyl is still being discovered.
