“What would?”
“What we talked about, Larry. The time is now. The banks and the big investment firms and hedge funds are all coming to you begging for another bailout. They are envisioning 2008 and 2066, and why shouldn’t they? It keeps on happening! They gamble and lose, they can’t handle it, they come to you and cry, and threaten you with collapse of the global economy and a gigantic depression, and you create and hand over cash directly to them, and they bank it and wait out the storm, wait till other people get the ball rolling, and then they start gambling all over again. And now they own eighty percent of the world’s capital assets, and buy all the governments and laws, and you were part of that for many years. And now they’re doing it again. So they probably expect it will all go as it always has.”
“Because there’s not a counterexample,” he suggested, sipping his wine as he watched her.
“Sure there is. The 1930s depression brought huge structural adjustments, and the banks were put on a leash, and the rich were taxed like crazy, and what mattered were people.”
“There was World War Two to help all that, as I recall.”
“That was later, and it helped, but the structural adjustments in favor of people over banks had already happened when the war started.”
“I’ll look into that.”
“You should. You’ll find that the Fed ruled the banks, and the tax rate on annual income over four hundred thousand dollars was ninety percent.”
“Really?”
“Ninety-one percent. They didn’t like rich people. World War Two made them very impatient with rich people. It was a Republican president who did it.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Not really. Stretch your imagination.”
“You’re doing it for me.”
“My pleasure. Anyway, even in 2008 they nationalized General Motors, and they could have nationalized the banks too, as a condition for giving them about fifteen trillion dollars. They didn’t do that because they were bankers themselves, and chickenshits. But they could have. And now you can do it.”
“But what do you mean, nationalize? I don’t even know what you mean.”
“Sure you do.” Franklin had suggested this riposte. “I don’t know, but you do. So you tell me what it means! All I know is you protect the depositors. And I presume any profits the banks make from then on will go to the government, to pay back what they borrowed from it. So they turn into like federal credit unions.”
“Why would anyone work in a bank, then?”
“For a salary! A good salary, but just a salary. Like anyone else.”
“Why would shareholders invest in a bank, then?”
“Same reason they buy T-bills. Security. Secure investment.”
“I can’t even imagine it.”
“Your lack of imagination is not good grounds for making policy.”
Larry shook his head. “I don’t know. Why would they say yes to this?”
“Say yes or go bust! You offer the deal to the biggest bank, or the biggest bank in the worst trouble, the one about to blow up first. Put the fucking screws on them, they accept the deal or you let them fail as an encouragement to the others. So either way you’re okay. If they accept, the others have to fall in line or collapse. If they don’t accept, you blow the worst one up and go to the next one in line on the gangplank and say, Do you want to go down like Citibank or do you want to live?”
He laughed. “It would get their attention.”
“Of course! And you print the fucking money you’re bailing them out with anyway, so why should you worry? To you it’s just quantitative easing!”
“Inflation,” he said. “Sure to happen.”
“Except when it doesn’t. Come on, don’t pretend theory works here. Besides you want a little inflation, that’s economic health, right?”
“But it can so quickly get out of hand.”
“When you own the banks, you can definitely deal with it. You’ll have your foot on the gas and the brakes.”
He shook his head. “If only it were as simple as that.”
She stared at him.
“It would help if there was support in Congress,” he mentioned, glancing at her. The whole meal he had been looking into his wineglass, as if peering into a crystal ball and hoping for a vision. Now he was looking at her.
“I know,” she said. “I’m trying. If I’m elected I’ll help, but either way there’ll be a group there to help. People are mad. I mean really mad. Unusually mad.”
“It’s true. And then you told them to stop paying their mortgages.”
“Well, it’s Amelia who started that, but yeah. She was right. We want a better deal. We’re on strike against God.”
Their food came and they ate. They talked about the city’s recovery, the various problems and efforts. The way their old walking routes in Central Park had been wiped off the map. The way the past was gone; or, not.
On to dessert, one crème br?lée between them. As tradition demanded, they fenced over it with spoons, cracking the burnt surface and knocking each other’s spoons aside, finally chopping a line down the middle to delineate their portions. At that point Charlotte decided the atmosphere was friendly enough to bring up a delicate matter.
“So,” she said, “let me tell you a story. And I want you to know right from the start that it isn’t blackmail or anything.”
“That’s so reassuring,” Larry said, eyes going a little round. He was far past making up expressions; this was real consternation.
“I hope so. Just listen. Once upon a time, there was a big investment firm with a couple hotshots running it. One of them was an asshole and a cheater, one of them was a nice guy. The cheater was cheating systemically in ways that were submerged so deep that the nice guy didn’t even know they were happening. That could happen, right?”
“Maybe,” Larry said, poking around in the crème br?lée as if looking for something.
“So then a quant working for them found this cheat, and tried to whistle-blow. But the cheater found out about it, and he went to his personal security team and said, Will not someone rid me of this mad quant? And his security said, We can do that no problem. Seeing as they were high on the FBI’s list of worst private security firms. Which is saying a great deal. But then the nice guy found out about it. That his partner had hired someone to kill someone to keep his cheating a secret. Which, due to joint enterprise laws, was their cheating. As the murder would be also.”