Our Own Ice-Nine

I’ve been trying to visualize the web of toxic debt and derivatives that have strapped our economy to the ground. I first thought of Gulliver in Lilliput, lying on his back, helplessly trying to get a look at the teeny beings scurrying around and over him with their wispy threads.

Each thread and each individual Lilliputian scarcely worth Gulliver’s attention, but together all of them—all of these complex yet gnat-like financial instruments—had him completely immobilized, like our banking system.

Unlike Gulliver, we are not in this alone. The pestilence has spread around the world, and with frightening speed, threatening to freeze most of the world’s major economies. That made me think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

In this 1963 sci-fi/political parody, an earnest, somewhat naïve scientist who helped develop the atom bomb creates an isotope of water that is solid at room temperature—a tweak of the normal, somewhat analogous to the creation of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, securitized debt instruments and the rest.

The scientist has no malevolent purpose in mind. But what happens is that samples of Ice Nine, as the isotope is called, fall into the wrong hands, primarily those of his children—just as the powerful new investment instruments were taken up by others in the financial community.

All the while, the keepers of Ice-Nine know that it has the power to destroy the world. But they don’t guard it with the care it demands. Finally a chance incident occurs: A plane crashes, triggering a landslide, which takes with it the unsecured samples of Ice-Nine and washes them into the sea.

Remember that one drop of Ice-Nine freezes every molecule of water it touches. In the blink of an eye, all the oceans and rivers of the world freeze solid, much as our financial system has done or threatens to do.

We have not had any trouble identifying villains, but the villains are loathe to recognize themselves. Like the characters in Cat’s Cradle, they do not set out to perpetrate evil. In their own minds, they are undone by outside forces, freak occurrences, the financial equivalents of a plane crashing and triggering an avalanche.

Ice-Nine, we learn in Cat’s Cradle, can be melted, but the life is destroyed before this knowledge can be put to use. We have created our own Ice-Nine, and we had better undo it before it’s too late.

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