A closer look
Infamous cartel leader Pablo Escobar generated so much illicit liquid wealth during the peak of his drug trafficking empire that his accounting department spent approximately two thousand five hundred dollars every single month just purchasing rubber bands to wrap the stacks of physical cash. Because the cartel was bringing in nearly twenty-two billion dollars a year, storing the mountains of paper currency became a massive logistical nightmare that resulted in them writing off ten percent of their annual income simply because rats were eating the bills in storage. This essentially means that Escobar was losing over two billion dollars a year to hungry rodents and agricultural rot. Most people are struggling to pay their monthly utility bills, while this guy was single-handedly propping up the entire South American rubber band manufacturing industry just to keep his astronomically large piles of dirty money from flying away in the wind
