Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Read Free Book Online Page B

particularly those whose grandparents were old Fascists willing to talk.
    “Our Leader awaits you,” she said, not bothering to look up from her screen as he approached her desk. The downside of such close relations was that she felt comfortable indulging a degree of sullenness that would otherwise have been considered unprofessional. The gain, however, was worth it. She did exactly as instructed even if it meant telling the chief of administration to screw off. She had no loyalty to the organization but plenty to Doug.
    This was important. When Holland had hired Doug, Union Atlantic had been a regional, commercial bank. It took in deposits, offered checking accounts to the public, and made loans to businesses and real estate developers. It had the conservative balance sheet of the highly regulated institution that it was. But Holland’s plan for the company was much larger. Through acquisition, he wanted it to grow into a financial-services conglomerate with an investment banking arm, an insurance division, and a private wealth management business.
    Holland had given Doug two jobs, one as head of foreign operations and the other as the man in charge of the newly created Department of Special Plans. The purpose of the latter was to formulate long-term strategy for how Union Atlantic should navigate the new, deregulated environment, in which Congress was slowly repealing all the old, New Deal reforms that had prevented banks from owning the insurers and investment houses Holland wanted to buy. Doug had done a ferociously good job. On his advice, the bank had brazenly commenced acquisitions that were strictly speaking still illegal but that Doug foresaw would be approved by the time the deals were finalized, in part because of Union Atlantic’s own lobbying but also because their competitors, as soon as they caught on, would follow suit adding their own legislative pressure to scrap the old protections. Leading the pack, Holland, Doug, and the management team had been able to cherry-pick the most profitable companies to acquire. In less than six years,while several of the older behemoths had stumbled, Union Atlantic had grown from a stand-alone commercial bank into Union Atlantic Group, a global player and one of the four largest financial companies in the country. Holland had capped it off with the new tower. Soon thereafter he’d appeared on the cover of Fortune and BusinessWeek . The leading industry analyst, a prick named Koppler, pronounced Union Atlantic Group the herald of a new paradigm for multi-platform financial services and its stock rose six percent in a day.
    All that was before the fall of 2001. The 9/11 attacks had cut nearly seven hundred points off the Dow. Then, less than two months later, Enron had collapsed. Like many banks, Union Atlantic had provided the Houston energy trader and its off-balance-sheet partnerships with considerable amounts of financing. Meanwhile, Atlantic Securities, the investment banking arm, had sold Enron’s bonds to investors and had purchased many of them with its own money. Still, that wasn’t the worst of it. In December, Argentina had defaulted on its sovereign debt.
    For years, Argentina had been a poster child for the International Monetary Fund, obediently implementing the Washington Consensus on structural adjustment, privatizing state-owned industries and public-sector utilities, mostly by selling them to foreign investors, and it had brought inflation under control by pegging the peso to the dollar. In the process, the bonds that the Argentinean government sold to finance its spending had become hugely popular with Western banks. They paid a higher rate of interest than the bonds of first-world countries, and given the IMF’s ongoing support of the Argentinean economy, they seemed a safe bet, even after a deep recession in the late nineties.
    Countries as economically mature and as connected to the global system as Argentina didn’t walk away from their sovereign