NY Times: "High finance backfires on Alabama county"

The New York Times reports that Jefferson County is in big trouble financially:

Jefferson County is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy after a series of exotic bond deals that the bankers concocted went wrong, and the interest on its debts, rather than shrinking as the bankers had promised, has ballooned like a bad subprime mortgage.

Officials from Birmingham, the county seat, are trying to persuade Wall Street creditors to let them soften the terms of the deals. If they fail, the county could sink into in one of the biggest public bankruptcies in American history.

Read the whole thing here.