The catastrophic incompetence of Citigroup
In the late fall of 1970, a forty-five-foot sperm whale beached itself on the Oregon coast and expired. Local authorities, puzzling over how best to dispose of the huge rotting carcass, decided to blow it up, trusting that seabirds and other scavengers would consume any remains not carried out to sea. A half-ton of dynamite was accordingly packed around the whale and detonated, but things did not go as planned. Instead of the intended tidy dissolution, huge chunks of decaying blubber rained down far and wide, destroying property and inflicting a noxious stench throughout the landscape.
That fiasco, a…
