Words That Cause Catastrophes – WSJ

We know that in an era of instant media transmission ill-chosen words move well beyond a personal problem for the speaker. Loose talk can put in motion national and international catastrophes that may wreck lives, economies and political systems.

Until a few days ago, Ammar al-Khudairy was one of the world’s most powerful men, as chairman of Saudi National Bank. He resigned Monday, reportedly for “personal reasons.” Not quite.

In an interview two weeks ago, as a banking panic was leaking out of California, Mr. Khudairy said the Saudi bank would “absolutely not” give more capital to on-the-bubble

Credit Suisse

bank. In hours, that Saudi “absolutely not” had Switzerland itself headed for collapse.

Suddenly, a bank panic that originated inside a navel-gazing boutique regional bank in Silicon Valley had jumped across the Atlantic to threaten one of the world’s 30 “global systemically important” banks. Switzerland’s national authorities quickly compelled its other major bank, the massive

UBS,

to swallow Credit Suisse.

Here’s another fellow who never listened to his mother: Donald Trump. One must posit that despite, or perhaps because of, his habit of saying whatever enters his mind, Mr. Trump did get elected president of the United States. While Mr. Trump himself regrets nothing, much of the country likely regrets his compulsion to tweet, during the chaotic afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

Mr. Trump was self-referencing his insistence that Vice President Pence, presiding at that moment over the U.S. Senate, should have voted to block certification of

Joe Biden’s

victory in the Electoral College. Mr. Trump’s legal culpability for that day aside, there is no doubt that the destructive forces put in motion on Jan. 6 were related both to his Pence remark and earlier statements about a “stolen election.”

The aftermath has been unhappy for many pulled into the Trump verbal vortex….