Chris Zell wrote:
* There have been times when the US was faced with defeat and encountered a miracle. The US had only enough rubber to fight WW2 for a few months - and suddenly discovered synthetic rubber. The was comparatively minor compared to what writer W.L. Laurence the "Great Five Year Miracle that Saved the World" with regard to the Nazis / Fascists being denied the A-bomb, following Fermis discovery of fission, in Italy, which happen years before he made a quick exit to the USA. IOW our blessed nation pretty much backed into this technology, using mainly the expertise of Jewish scientists, escaping from the bigotry that could have resulted in world domination, had they not been so bold. Irony of ironies: http://www.hcc.mnscu.edu/chem/abomb/page_id_4305.html A curious part of that particular miracle was that Laura Fermi, wife of Enrico, was an American. In 1938, the Fermis immigrated to the United States to escape the anti-Semitic politics of the Fascist government of Mussolini, close ally to Hitler. Laura was Jewish, but Enrico was not, yet the bigotry ran so deep in the Nazi and Fascist regimes that even association by marriage would have sent them both to the concentration camps. Another more recent near miss incident that no one has yet classified as a miracle or even discussed for that matter (due to lack of new details) deserves mentioning. Remember the so-called Bin Laden trades ? Thread starts here: http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg22284.html This happened a year before the recent stock market crash, but looking back on it, it is almost as if it served to deny some group what could have been a $50 billion gain, instead of perhaps what ended up as a $10 billion loss. There were denials from insiders at the time, which sound even more ludicrous today than then, that anything was amiss: http://www.thestreet.com/story/10377063/dispelling-the-bin-laden-options-tra des.html LOL so called box-trades would never go that deep, but the denial did serve to silence the inquisitive, since nothing else seemed to fit the situation, and no new revelations were forthcoming. yet, I had had half-expected some ambitious investigative journalist to provide a final answer to the situation by now, but that has not happened . Presumably this incident could have been orchestrated by an enemy, and perhaps it was the Bin Laden family or another Saudi group, but it could have been related to one of the rogue traders at two investment banking firms that went under in the same time period Curious story, that one but little more than a footnote in history, and one that we will probably never know the answer to, unless some insider decides to come clean but with the benefit of hindsight - one has to laugh at the naiveté of the predominant insider opinion at the time: that a market drop of 1/3 is extreme by any standards and could never happen. Yet one year later it did happen. In retrospect, these trades were likely the result of someones very sophisticated computer program, which was accurately predicting the very event that later happened only some clerk accidentally mistyped a date that was off by one year, somewhere in transposing the Hubberts curve database to the program ;-) Jones
