Warnings Quotes
Churchill was reported to be so angry and exasperated that his face turned red and he was sputtering. During World War II, Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian Nationalists were leading protests against British control of India. This not only bogged down British soldiers surprising the nationalists rather than fighting in Burma or in other war theaters, but India supplied a huge number of battalions to the British Army the world over and if that manpower dried up, the allied war effort would suffer. The American State Department wanted Churchill to announce that after Japan was defeated, there would be a process toward self-government. This way, they thought, the Indians would redouble their effort to defeat the Japanese and stop the then current protests and strikes. Churchill was strongly opposed to any diminution of the British Empire, but beyond that, he knew India quite well and realized that at any hint of Independence the large Muslim minority in India would insist on autonomy or a partition of the country and use sectarian violence and terror to intimidate the Indian Congress party and the British, but the major victims of the terror—the Hindus and the Sikhs would not remain passive, but would retaliate in kind. President Roosevelt was in the midst of planning the Normandy Landings of the D-Day invasion and did not want to pressure Churchill and the British at this point in time, so the door to independence was not opened during the war and Britain had to deal with the protests throughout. However, when, after the war, the Labor Government, started a process toward Indian independence which resulted in exactly what Churchill predicted. At least 2 million Indians were slaughtered in the internecine terrorist cycles of fear and retaliation motivated terror attacks what were so extensive that the British military could not really control it.
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}.
This was a warning to Saudi Arabia that the United States might seize the oil fields. At the time we were not getting enough oil for domestic needs and the military in Europe and in Vietnam. The King arranged to secretly supply oil to the United States while maintaining to the other Arab countries that it was maintaining the boycott of the West.
The Prime Minister feared an insurrection if his economy collapsed and had shared that fear with the U. S. Ambassador. the informal response was that he should settle his dispute and negotiations with Great Britain over the oil contracts before the U. S. would move. He then sent this letter. Mohammad Mosaddegh had been elected President of Iraq. However, he was left leaning in the midst of the Cold War and some of our policy strategists thought that he could hurt the U. S. interests which were large there. Iran had huge oil reserves and American and British companies were active in operating the oil drilling and export. The Shah, with CIA support, fired Mosaddegh, but that backfired and the Shah had to flee the country. This was when Smith sent this note to the President. We were prepared to try and work with Mosaddegh. However, our chief ally did not agree and wanted to oust Mosaddegh. At the request of the British MI6 intelligence service, the CIA implemented a “spontaneous” coup d’etat to overthrow the popularly elected Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh. This enabled the Shah to return and take over. Ironically, although he was anti-Communist, he threatened the American and British Oil Companies and forced them to “renegotiate” their contracts with Iran and pay the Shah more money. The Shah was very unpopular and over the years the Iranians who opposed the Shah, blamed the United States for the fact that Mosaddegh had been overthrown and the Shah returned to power. See {637008} and {637007}.
A number of the hacking incidents that occurred in 2016 were done by foreign governments. This was a subtle form of threatening those nations who had been doing the hacking of American public and private entities. Without making any overt threat to retaliate, he was reminding would be future hackers to desist less the U. S. decide to retaliate in kind with greater capacity and more sophisticated techniques.
Born thought that her agency was responsible for regulating the new esoteric financial products—derivatives including credit default swaps—for otherwise there would be no regulation at all of financial products that could dwarf the stock and bond market. Summers persuaded her to back off. When the Meltdown of 2008 hit, the huge derivative exposure of the large banks and some insurance companies was so great that it was one of the major causes for the meltdown of the entire banking system. Summers, normally a great economist not only called this one wrong, but later, along with most other government and private economists ignored a very explicit warning—See {637168}, {637986}, and {620038}.
Browder and the Communist Party were bothered that the Socialist Party had allowed a sect of American Trotskyites join their ranks.
Two months later the attack of September 11 took place. CIA Director Tenant had been do alarmed by the information that the CIA had obtained that he immediately called the National Security Advisor to arrange a briefing at the White House. This was attended by Rich B, Tenant, and his deputy for counter-terrorism, Cofer Black. Black recommended that the United States immediately go on a “war footing.” It is not known what Rice discussed with President Bush but the nation did not go on a war footing and there was no alert even of the airports where the terrorists started their attack taking over planes. Tenant would later say that one of his biggest regrets was that he did not take the matter to the President personally when his meeting with Rice produced no action.
U. S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Rajan a “Luddite” for this view, but what Rajan observed and predicted was exactly what happened in the Meltdown of 2008 which led to the Great Recession. Rajan was one of the few economists to call this right. Several, invested their own money assuming a crash and made billions. Most, like Summers and the Federal Reserve Chairmen in retrospect admitted that they missed the signs and didn’t connect the dots. See {637168}, {637987}, and {620038}
This was yet another warning about an area that became a major factor 4 years later in the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. The George W. Bush administration, however, rejected proposals to prevent more mortgage abuses by regulating the banks and mortgage brokerage industry more.
He argues that the serious dangers societies face are the ones that are unexpected, often so improbable that we consider them impossible and never prepare for them.
Prieto had repeatedly warned the Prime Minister that there was a military coup in preparation to oust his government and establish a Fascist dictatorship. The Prime Minister was blind to the Spanish reality of the day, ignored the plotters, and the coup was the beginning of the tragic Spanish Civil War.
