The Mafia, the highest stage of Capitalism.
Gustave Jaeger, 1997
Perhaps a sound fallback option for Afghanistan would be a wholesale money lending by US/Intl banks.... After all, if it worked for Japan's Yakuza?
Suddenly, in the 1980s, the banks' biggest borrowers started to look elsewhere for money. By then, Toyota, Sony, Honda and the like could borrow more cheaply in international capital markets than at home. Faced with a drop-off in business, Japanese banks began aggressively courting new borrowers. In particular, says Manabu Miyazaki, a best-selling author who has also run for national office and whose father was a gangster boss, the banks pushed money on mobsters to sustain the growth of their loan portfolios.
Of course, it wasn't a one-way street. Once word spread that banks would lend money even to criminals, underworld figures were quick to take advantage. To Japan's at least 78,000 yakuza, it was an opportunity to shift away from the illegal gambling, prostitution, drugs, street peddling and protection rackets that had been their mainstays for four centuries, and enter legitimate businesses. By the time the bankers started to wonder whether they'd ever get their money back from their shiny new customers, they had already extended them billions in loans and it was too late.
Often, the banks lent to kigyo shatei, or front companies for yakuza organizations. Earlier this year, one U.S. financial institution investigated a Japanese bank looking for a foreign partner. While the bank didn't have a reputation for involvement with the yakuza, investigators discovered it had advanced as much as 80% of its $1 billion in outstanding loans to companies that were either related to or fronts for the yakuza. |
