To lighten the mood a little, let's talk about toxic waste. I'm reading a book about organized crime in southern Italy - Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano. Saviano recounts the astonishing inventiveness of the illegal waste disposal industry based outside Naples. They bring toxins from all over Europe and dump them into any available space.
When the dumps fill up, they set a fire. When there's nothing left to burn, they cover everything and build houses. The houses must be built on concrete supports because the trash heaps are unstable. Another profitable tactic is mixing the waste with something else. For instance, it can be combined with compost and sold to farmers or mixed into cement and made into walls. In the end, a toner cartridge from Milan rains down on Capri, donates a few toxic grains to a bottle of Chianti and has something left to make a hotel in Rome carcinogenic.
Sounds sort of like what we did with subprime mortgages, doesn't it? One bad mortgage was packaged, borrowed against, insured and re-packaged until little bits of it were incorporated into every aspect of our financial system. Instead of making the toxins disappear, it made everything it touched a little more toxic.
The weird thing is, in southern Italy, just like in our banking sector, the bosses dumped most of the waste right near their houses. Saviano has a theory about why and maybe it applies with equal force to our investment bankers, "The bosses have no qualms about saturating their towns with toxins ... The life of a boss is short. In the here and now of business there are no negatives, only a high profit margin."
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