Citing just one example from a recent (if bygone) era, in 1994 Bankers Trust, one of America's largest financial institutions, sold toxic swaps to two clients.
Wrath played a leading role in the financial meltdown of 2008, as it does today, as financial institutions offload toxic securities to their competitors in order to cripple them while surviving themselves.
Compare that with the $50 billion already given to Citigroup, plus an astounding $300 billion to guarantee that institution's toxic assets.
The disclosure that highly leveraged financial institutions were holding toxic securitised American subprime mortgages shocked market participants.
But because these institutions underwrote many toxic loans in the boom, barring attorneys general from bringing actions against them for lending improprieties is no way to hold dubious actors accountable.
Indeed, in an ironic twist of fate, these risky and toxic institutions get the best deal of all: because they are the favorites of Uncles Sam and Ben they enjoy the lowest costs of issuing liabilities (that is to say, borrowing).
Yet the housing bubble in the United States was the primary cause of its deep recession, and contributed enormously to the financial crisis - including through the over-leveraging of financial institutions and the toxic assets and derivatives that they spread around the world.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, described by Labour MP Tom Watson as a "toxic institution", could find itself publishing his book on phone hacking as the publisher considers a bid for Penguin.
To take a financial institution, move the toxic assets into the bad bank, require the bank to continue to try to liquidate those assets and have the bad bank being subsidized for the time being by the U.S. government.
He has a preferred candidate for the job: Richard Grennell, his former press spokesman at the U.N. and now ambassador to Germany, a man who shares Bolton's disdain for the institution and his toxic bully-boy approach to foreign policy.
