Washington Post (November 14)
Donald Trump’s “Asia tour has been at times a disaster, at times a farce.” To pick a “most shameful moment” would be challenging. “There was a time when the world looked to the U.S. president to speak clearly in defense of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights. I refer to the entirety of modern U.S. history before January, when Trump assumed the high office he now dishonors.”
Tags: Asia, Democracy, Disaster, Dishonor, Farce, Freedom, Human rights, Rule of law, Shameful, Trump, U.S.
New York Times (August 20)
“With each day, President Trump offers fresh proof that he is failing the office that Americans entrusted to him. The rolling disaster of his presidency accelerated downhill last week…. Since the 1930s it has not typically been a challenge for an American leader to denounce Nazism.” But last week, Trump “chose instead to deliver a defense of white supremacists that raised as never before profound doubts about his moral compass, his grasp of the obligations of his office and his fitness to occupy it.”
Tags: Disaster, Downhill, Failing, Fitness, Grasp, Nazism, Obligations, Trump, White supremacists. Doubts. Moral compass
Reuters (May 16)
“President Trump is now the leaker in chief.” His “conduct over the past week strikes at the heart of the United States intelligence community. He does not seem to grasp how it works…. The damage Trump has done to his own intelligence services, their foreign counterparts, and their relationships with the White House in four short months might take four long years to repair. If it can be repaired, that is.”
Institutional Investor (May 15)
“The Cambrian explosion has nothing on institutional investing.” Rather than millions of years, institutional investing’s journey from small and simple to enormously complex took only half a century…. The unfortunate and ironic part is that all this innovation has done little to quell crises…. Underlying every instance of disaster is the same root: We simply do not know what we think we know.”
Tags: Cambrian, Complex, Crises, Disaster, Innovation, Institutional, Investing, Simple
LA Times (January 30)
“The mere idea of President Trump’s executive order suspending the entry into the country of various visitors, migrants and refugees was bad enough…. In execution, it was a disaster, plunging U.S. airports into chaos and displaying a shocking lack of forethought and planning and a deeply troubling failure of basic communication and coordination among and between federal and local authorities.”
Tags: Airports, Chaos, Disaster, Execution, Executive order, Failure, Migrants, Refugees, Trump, U.S.
Bloomberg (July 8)
“Since its commercial introduction in 2007, the Airbus A380 has brought a long-lost sense of glamour back to travel…. Financially speaking, it’s a disaster of similarly grand proportions.” Airbus has “acknowledged it will never recoup the €25 billion ($32 billion)” of initial development costs. If production falls below 30 planes a year, there’s also a chance production could go back into the red, after only one year of profitability. “Axing the A380 outright” still remains “hard to do. Besides the embarrassment of admitting defeat on the program,” write downs that would ripple through the company and much of Europe.
Tags: A380, Airbus, Development costs, Disaster, Embarrassment, Europe, Glamour, Planes, Production, Profitability, Recoup, Write-downs
Bloomberg (March 11)
“It’s been five years since the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl shook Fukushima. Roads have been rebuilt and electricity has been restored. But life has still not returned to normal for many of the prefecture’s residents.”
New York Times (December 25)
“Evil is everywhere, and anger and hatred are loud. The shouting drowns out the quiet; tragedy and disaster block the view of the good. Yet there are always signs of progress toward a better future. Look, or you may miss them.”
New York Times (September 3)
“A disaster has been averted. The nuclear deal concluded by six major powers with Iran is now unstoppable in Congress.” Had the deal “unraveled in Congress, so would America’s standing as a global power. Russia, China and the European Union would have concluded that the United States is unserious.”
New York Times (July 14)
The EU’s tentative deal “may avert an immediate catastrophe, but there is little to celebrate since it will do little to address, much less repair, the slow-moving disaster of the Greek economy.” For that matter, “in forcing Greece to submit they have not resolved the crisis of the monetary union or advanced the European project.”
Tags: Catastrophe, Crisis, Deal, Disaster, Economy, EU, European project, Greece, Monetary union
