It is always difficult for me to reflect fondly or proudly on anything I accomplished fewer than 10 or 15 years earlier, much less in late December when the twin shames of all the hours I spent neglecting my children to report stories I never got around to publishing feel so vividly, irreversibly fresh, but I wrote a few fun yarns over the past year on the subject of American kleptocracy that are certainly as worth your time as just about any of the other slop you’ll find on the internet these days.
“Rich Bank Dumb Bank” is the wild, fairly summary-proof tale of the rise and fall of Signature Bank, which started with the shocking assassination (or possibly, simple murder) of its spiritual godfather Edmond Safra around the start of the millennium and ended one weekend earlier this year when it was seized by bank regulators in what many defenders suspected was a political hit designed to make the $22 billion bailout of Silicon Valley Bank look like a legitimate response to a “systemic” bank liquidity crisis. A magnet for grifters and money launderers large and small—Anna Delvey was a client; SBF had 24 separate accounts at the bank—Signature’s “signature” offering was a “private blockchain” that enabled crypto swindlers, drug cartels, and random money launderers to send funds back and forth to one another outside the purview of normal money laundering oversight authorities—not that there’s ever been much evidence those authorities are paying any attention in the first place. Naturally, no one has been indicted in connection with the bank’s failure, but Banco Santander just bought a $9 billion portfolio of Signature’s distressed real estate loans for $1.1 billion.
“The Oliver Twist” is about the burgeoning business of dubious medications that cost more than six figures per year to take and how a young short seller with a knack for reading medical journals ran into financial trouble when he bet against the stocks of a few insanely priced “orphan drugs.” Martin Shkreli refused to comment for the story, which he later complained to be rife with inaccuracies. “The worst thing about your story is that it makes me look somewhat good,” Shkreli wrote me on Twitter after it appeared. “Rest assured I am a terrible person.”
“Quackonomics” … and speaking of terrible people, this story about a $20 billion Alabama real estate investment trust that sucks cash out of safety-net hospitals and uses it to rain billions down on private equity firms and buy mega-superyachts for narcissist cardiac surgeons and bribe Maltese officials and maybe even assassinate journalists will absolutely blow your mind, especially when you Google the scheme after it’s over and learn that literally none of the three-letter federal authorities that should have cracked down on it have done anything to put a stop to it. But if you’ve ever wondered why health care in this country is at once so expensive and also so bad, the saga of how hundreds of hospitals in this country were mercilessly gutted and/or shut down solely to finance a flagrant white-collar crime spree perpetrated by exceedingly reckless/sloppy cartoon villains may prove enlightening.
“Born to Die” is, to that end, about how with almost no startup capital whatsoever, you too can incorporate a for-profit hospice agency and start billing the federal government more than $1,000 a day for every senior citizen you can find who is mentally incapacitated enough to forgo his right to health care. If you’ve ever had the thought that our health care system feels a lot more like “death panels” than it did when Sarah Palin made her famous prophecy, this is the story for you!
“Days of Plunder” is a mega-review of two big private equity books that were published this year, with a digression on the Nazi chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which made millions micromanaging the Holocaust and the Final Solution and whose executives at Nuremberg were punished about as harshly as this country punished Angelo Mozilo and Alec Litowitz for creating the 2008 financial crisis. It was the most depressing thing I wrote this year and everything I write is depressing, but it was also the most popular by a long shot, so if you missed this viral sensation, now is your chance!
