Two Articles from the LRB

Paul Laity on Lee Clarke’s Worst Cases and John Christensen on Raymond Baker’s Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System.

I’m curious if there has been a sustained fictional treatment of a culture/civilization steadily planning for a highly improbable total disaster scenario chosen randomly from a field of many. Posner’s Catastrophe, among others, brought this to mind.

Key graf from Christensen:

Much of the growth of the offshore economy has been driven by British lawyers and accountants. As early as the 1920s, they pioneered the use of trusts, shell companies, transfer mispricing, re-invoicing, dummy wire transfers – which give the impression a company is operating out of a tax haven rather than its actual location – and special purpose vehicles. Dodging tax was the prime motive, but inevitably, as Baker explains, laundering narco-dollars and paying off corrupt officials involve the same processes as tax evasion.