As they ate dinner, Maja described the destruction at the house and all the work she thought it might take to get it back in shape. She knew that she was being a bore, but Aneeta clucked sympathetically and Adil poured generous glasses of Japanese whiskey for Ted. They were outraged at all the right parts, even when Maja told them about waiting endlessly on hold with the insurance company and then getting cut off just as the line finally clicked to life.

Inevitably, Ted and Adil fell into a long discussion about the markets. For the people she knew who worked at investment banks, their job wasn’t just a job. It was their passion, their hobby, and their way of life. Normally Maja would have been annoyed at another dinner conversation hijacked by work talk, but tonight she was grateful for the distraction, and even more grateful that Aneeta seemed to be following the conversation with interest. Maja was exhausted, and happy to half-listen while she leaned back in her chair, looking out at the garden.

Adil poured Ted another whiskey. Was that his fourth? Whatever, Maja thought. She’d had a fair bit herself tonight. What was the point of abstaining when she was never actually going to get pregnant?

“We’ve been dumping that shit at J.P. Morgan for six months,” Adil was saying. “Frankly, my opinion was that we never should have been in the mortgage-backed securities market to begin with. Maybe ten years ago. Back then, at least you knew what you were getting. The ratings meant something. I’ve done the due diligence on some of these products, and you wouldn’t believe some of the subprime shit that’s packed into them. But nobody wants to hear it from the lawyer. The traders are too busy counting their bonuses.”

Ted laughed, but it sounded forced, which caught Maja’s attention. “I don’t think there’s a firm on the street who isn’t doing these deals,” Ted said. “Investors like the yields on the mortgage vehicles, and we’re making bank on the fees. We’re printing money. Or we were,” he corrected himself. “There’ve been some liquidity problems lately. But the ratings are good.”

“The ratings are bullshit,” Adil said. “Those AAA ratings aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Have you ever stopped to think about it? Who do you think the customer is for those ratings? It’s the bank, not the investor. You guys package up debt obligations you don’t know the first thing about, slice them, dice them, and take them over to Standard and Poor’s, where you pay them for a nice rating so you can market them in your funds. If you don’t like the rating, you take your business down the street. It’s in everyone’s interest to push these things through. Have you ever looked, really looked, at the underlying assets?”