Fun aside about the timber land transaction (land with forest on it, not boots, by the way): The seller of the timberlands was an office supply company that rhymes with Losses Smacks. Waaay back in the old days they were actually a paper PRODUCING company. They transitioned to SELLING stuff made out of paper in the middle of last century, but they still had over two billion dollars worth of trees on the books, probably for over sixty years by that point.

When the recession hit, they decided to sell the trees, but it was parcelled up into a structured transaction that I can’t really describe from memory - like I said, it needed a thirty-page memo with five pages of charts to describe - but I do remember that the “sale” was really something like a very long lease to multiple paper-only companies, through trusts, with a couple of $700 million downpayments up front (backed by the Big Fucking Banks), so the tax bill on the “sale” wouldn’t be fully due until the late 2020’s.

Incredible stuff. Anybody who thinks there’s a pat solution for financial scheming is fooling themselves.