Matt Levine, Columnist

Tontines and Marshmallows

Also corrections, Somali shillings, bank bonuses, regulatory SWAT teams and unicorns.

March 27, 2017 at 1:26 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Tontines.

Here is a fun story about the return of the tontine, the 17th-century financial innovation in which a bunch of people put money in a pot, agreed that whoever died last would get the whole pot, and then set about surreptitiously trying to murder each other and claim the prize. Or that is my general impression of tontines, and I am not alone: "Works by Agatha Christie, Robert Louis Stevenson and P. G. Wodehouse all featured tontine members plotting to kill one another in hope of a big payoff." (There's also a "Simpsons" episode.)