Stoogepie Bank: Open for Business

When I was just a wee stoogepie, my daddy used to say, “Son, every great crisis presents a great opportunity.” Then he would create a crisis of some kind.

So, I have given a lot of thought to this whole global financial crisis. Where is the great opportunity?

Yeah, the financial crisis gave the nation as a whole the balls to elect a black president, and that’s something to be proud of. And it may yet give the nation the hair on those balls to institute a truly massive national stimulus that, while it would be nearly impossible to beat Roosevelt’s New Deal, could come close. Trillions of dollars may go toward making this nation’s middle class prosper and once again control America’s vast wealth. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. The stimulus package already approved by Congress is only a drop in the bucket, though. It doesn’t even yet include a bailout of banks.

All this is fine. But meanwhile, I have been asking myself, how can I, stoogepie, make billions off of this world economic crisis?

American Express provided the answer. See, in November, American Express, which is a credit card company and not a bank, decided that it would declare itself a bank. It did. Then it applied for and received $3.39 billion in bailout money. The CIT Group, a commercial lender that offers no traditional bank services and no consumer services, did the same thing. It declared itself a bank and then got $2.33 billion in bailout money. Both companies became banks just to take advantage of the bailout.

And so it occurred to me, why not open a bank? I mean, the final bill for bailing out America’s banks is very likely to be a couple of trillion bucks. I want some of that. Don’t you want some of that?

So, welcome to stoogepie Bank. You can view the mockup of the full stoogepie Bank website here. None of it works yet and, hopefully, the bank will be belly up before I ever finish designing the website.

Here is how it works: you send stoogepie Bank your money and I lose it all making incredibly bad investments, just like a real financial mogul. I will even make shoddy investments such as lending your money back to you so that you can buy houses and fancy shoes. Need a student loan or a credit card? Well, stoogepie Bank will give you both. And, instead of asking you to pay back your loans with money, stoogepie Bank will accept sex. Until the bailout money comes. Then we’ll all head to our own luxury retreat.

See, it’s incredibly easy to start a bank. Here in New York, for instance, all you need is $7-10 million in start-up capital. Then you pay a $12,500 fee and you have a bank. Okay, you also need to fill out a 54-page application, but most of that application is composed of instructions, like a for-dummies guide to opening a bank. In California, it’s more complicated to figure out the fees because you have to pay an assessment of your bank’s total assets and, to start a bank, you must have a minimum of $6-10 million in start-up capital. With $10 million, your fee for starting a bank would be $14,417 this year. You pay that and fill out a one-page form, and you’ve got yourself a bank! All of a sudden, you are eligible for bailout money!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I want some bailout money. See, I’m all for helping out people in need, but I kind of have a problem with helping out people who are just stoopid or dishonest. Like the bankers who lost all that money and then got massive bonuses with the bailout money. Or the many people who lied on mortgage applications they knew they could never afford. Let’s face it: not only the lenders and appraisers and mortgage brokers were dishonest. Borrowers frequently lied on their applications, too. In fact, according to one survey, as many as 70% of the people defaulting on their mortgages lied on their mortgage applications, many lying about their income by multiplying it by as much five and others forging documents using their computers.

But more and more, I wonder whether I am just the fool. Were all those cheats the smart ones? While I was busy just going to work every day and putting off buying a brand new stoogepen until the market softened, they were getting cheap loans and big bonuses and riding the wave of plenty. And, now, when the bailout comes, I wind up with fucking diddly. They all get bailed out, and I get passed by.

Well, no fucking way! Give me my fucking share of the bailout money. They are giving away trillions! Trillions!

And, since I know that people who read my blog are uncommonly responsible and honest, none of you are probably getting shit out of this bailout, either. So, put all your money in stoogepie Bank! Get StoogeBling® and borrow your money and more back! Then, when I get a fat check from the bailout, I’ll send you your share.

I did my taxes recently. They are not finished yet but I owe a bundle of money again, in part because 2008 was not all that bad a year for me in spite of all the doom and gloom. But some of my tax money is going to wind up in irresponsible people’s pockets. Oh, sure, some of it will go to people who lost their jobs for no reason at all and some will go to people who are losing their homes although they did everything responsible and sensibly. A lot of it is going to the good, honest, hardworking people of this country I admire so much because I am nothing like them and wonder sometimes whether they even exist.

But none of my tax money is coming back to me.

Well, that’s fucking bullshit.

So, please, send me your money. I promise that I can be wildly irresponsible and I will lose much, much more money than you send me. And then, when I get my $25 billion like Wells Fargo got, we can all split it. Well, maybe like Wells Fargo, I will buy up another bank with about half of that money to get myself a tax break.

We’ll split what’s left over after I buy a bank. Don’t get fucking greedy.

Of course, I will have to be compensated as president of the bank. Unfortunately, thanks to Obama, I won’t be able to get the kind of pay that Goldman Sachs executives got with their bailout money. Before Obama took office, as part of the Bush bailout, the top five executives at Goldman Sachs were paid $242 million altogether for their fine work bankrupting the company so it needed to be bailed out. Now, under Obama, I will only be able to get up to $500,000 per year plus stock options that can only be used after the bailout money is paid back. Since I never intend to pay my bailout money back, that means I can only make half a mil. That’s practically fucking charity, people, because I will lose money better and faster than any of those fucktards at Goldman Sachs or Citicorp or AIG or Capital One did.

There is the small chance that the US will nationalize all the banks, and that would completely destroy my plan to get bailout money. But Obama has tried to dispel those nationalization rumors—without actually ruling that option entirely out—by citing his administration’s preference for a sound privately owned banking system. Yeah, I want that, too. As long as I get some fucking bailout money. Now, give me my fucking money.

Anyways, all I’m saying is, send stoogepie Bank all your money. I will invest it unwisely and lose it all. I promise! I will lend it back to you to buy whatever the fuck you want with nothing but your lies and promises as collateral. And you can pay your loans back with blowjobs and rimjobs until the bailout money comes. And then you’ll get your share.

So, anyway, aside from my announcement of stoogepie Bank, I do need to tell you all that there have been not one but two deaths in the stoogepie family in the past week, including my grandma. So, that pretty much leaves just me and mum still alive in the United States. When people die, they leave a lot of baggage behind that has to be taken care of, including funeral arrangements and will readings and unpaid taxes and such that I now have the pleasure of keeping on top of, so I may appear even more out of touch than usual for the next week or so. But I’m fine, as usual.

So that I could deliver the sermons, stoogepie became an ordained minister at the Universal Life Church Monastery, which claims to have ordained over twenty million people since 1959. You can become an ordained minister online, too! It takes ten minutes! Then you can order your Ministry-in-a-Box like I did so you, too, can buy your friends and family members a ticket to Marble City in your own personal style.

For the low additional price of $29.99, you can also receive the honorary degree Doctor of Divinity or Doctor of Metaphysics. And for only $11.99 per title, you can be proclaimed a saint or even be proclaimed the pope. I paid for a lot of these, so please call me Dr. Saint Stoogepie from now on. I don’t want to be pope. I don’t do headgear.

That’s all I have to say about that. But don’t forget to send me all your money.

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A Wisconsin Thanksgiving and Other Crap

I have been MIA and I apologize. I owe you a blog post, but I am busy as hell and not feeling very funny. I am busy because, in my little corner of the world in fabulous in New York City, the global financial crisis has hit home. See, in the daylight, I am a fish in an incredible creative pond where wonderful imaginative creatures do fabulously inspired things. In about a month, the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan here. I can’t talk a lot about that, but it’s one of those movie-lot wind-generating turbo fans. And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

I’m not worried about losing my job. If I lose my job, I will post more regularly and dress less frequently. But a lot of good people I work with who have pink hair and nose rings and who smoke crack during their lunch breaks are going to lose their jobs, and then who the fuck will hire them?

So, this global financial crisis we’re in is on my mind a lot lately. And I’ve wanted to write about the global financial crisis, but it’s pretty fucking complicated. I mean differential equations complicated. So, instead, I will ramble about my Thanksgiving and Wisconsin.

See, a lot of people like me don’t think they are personally impacted by this whole financial mess. That’s because a lot of people like me don’t live in the real world. We live in this fantasy world where we wake up and say, “Where the fuck am I today? And who the fuck are these bitches?”

My Thanksgiving was spent with my mother at her house. Every Thanksgiving we share a feast, with a whole turkey and a whole ham and all the fixings, between just the two of us. Mum does not exactly live in the real world, either.

But I have always thought that she lived in the real world much less than I did, because I do things that are real that she does not. Like, I fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day. My mom does not do those things, as far as I know. I have asked her and, though I never get a straight answer, I think that’s because the answer is “no, I do not fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day.”

But I was wrong, as I found out this Thanksgiving. Not about the fucking maybe, but my mum lives more in the real world than I do. I discovered this because this year’s Thanksgiving revelation was that many of the friends I had as a child were, in fact, not imaginary at all. They were real people.

I have checked around since then and realized that many of my childhood friends were real people. In fact, I was an imaginary friend outcast.

So, I don’t really live in the real world. In fact, I am realizing more and more that the things that I do that I thought made my world real actually make it more unreal. For instance, a couple of years ago I took a trip to the Sonoran Desert to shoot at fruit. It was just for kicks and relaxation, you know? It’s a dude thing. I brought the guns and fruit with me in an SUV, along with some recreational drugs. You are probably wondering what could possibly be more real than using fancy guns in the stifling, dry heat just outside of Maricopa to shoot exotic fruit I personally imported while stoned out of my mind. I used to wonder the same thing. And I will tell you. Worrying about how you will buy crayons for kids and where your retirement money will come from.

That’s where Wisconsin comes in.

A couple of years ago, five Wisconsin school boards worried about how they would continue to pay for services to retired teachers amid escalating medical costs. A trusted St. Louis investment bank advised them that the best return on their money would come from something called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. Now, maybe you’ve heard a lot about credit-default swaps and CDOs. But just in case you haven’t, a credit-default swap is sort of like insurance. It’s a private contract where you pay a premium just like with insurance. The difference is that it is insurance for credit: if a loan goes into default, the insurer owes you money. You don’t need to have anything to do with the lender or borrower to buy a credit-default swap on their loan. We won’t talk about credit-default swaps at all because they bore me. They’re pretty easy to understand.

Let’s talk about the CDOs the Wisconsin School Boards bought instead. With a CDO, somebody starts a company that buys a credit portfolio. It buys debt or maybe debt derivatives. The company funds these purchases by selling equity in itself and selling bonds it must pay back. Under this scheme, if you invest in a CDO, you never own any of the underlying assets or debt. It already sounds complicated, right? Well, there is a thing called a synthetic CDO that is even more complicated. It creates CDOs from other CDOs. And it’s a complex way for corporations to move bad debt off their books. It is in synthetic CDOs that the Wisconsin School Board unwittingly invested.

I won’t go into any more detail about how a synthetic CDO works, but if you’re really interested in the mechanics of it all, here is a mathematical formula you can ponder that may help to explain it all.

Anyways, these five Wisconsin school boards were convinced by their investment banker that CDOs were a really safe investment with a great return. In a meeting with their investment banker, he told them that, in order to lose money on their investment, “There would need to be fifteen Enrons.” That’s a direct quote from their tape-recorded meeting. So, the school boards invested $35 million dollars and borrowed another $165 million from a Irish bank to buy three CDOs from the Royal Bank of Canada. CDOs are deliciously global and awfully fucking expensive.

So, here we are fifteen Enrons — Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Sterns, Citigroup, to name a few — later. The Irish bank they borrowed the money from — Depfa — was bailed out by the German government to the tune of $85 billion. And their synthetic CDOs are pretty much worthless.

So, to pay back their debt, the Wisconsin school boards need to take money from their budgets. That means cutbacks for teachers and retirees. And it means fewer books and fewer crayons for children. As one first-grade teacher put it, “what happens to my retirement? Or the construction paper and pencils and supplies we need to teach?”

Well, Mr. or Ms. First-Grade Teacher, please see the formula above.

That’s the real world.

Here is something you should expect by now: the dude who was head of the Irish bank that got into that financial mess and had to be bailed out for $85 billion, Gerhard Bruckermann, got $150 million when he left the bank. Does this remind you of AIG, where the CEO of the company when it posted record losses and had to be bailed out, Martin Sullivan, was paid $47 million after he was fired? He also got an office and an assistant until the end of this year. That’s not the real world.

But in the real world, many people like you and me will lose their jobs and their pensions and their homes. Probably not me personally, at least not right away. But a lot of people I work with everyday.

A little while ago, we fired one of the bigshots where I work. This dude really had it coming. He made one big mistake each and every month he was with us, and each of those mistakes was at least as disastrous that the mistakes I make daily. He had been making like half a mil a year. After he got fired, I talked to him and he told me that his severance package sucked and he was on the verge of losing his house. He told a lot of people that. And I was discussing this with one of the pink-haired, chronically pierced women with whom I work and this is what she said.

Maybe you find it hard to feel sorry for Lehman Brothers or AIG or Citigroup. Maybe you think it’s wrong to bail those companies out. But let’s look at how a world financial collapse occurs. Credit-default swaps are a wonderful thing. Let’s say you have a business and you need to expand, but your credit is not so great. You had a rough year last year but, this year, your biggest competitor went out of business so business is booming. Still, your credit sucks and banks aren’t sure they want to lend you money. The answer is a credit-default swap: credit insurance. The bank will lend you money but buy a credit-default swap. You’ll pay a little more for the credit because the bank needs to pay for the swap. But your business can expand now, keeping the economy healthy and creating jobs. Everyone is happy and buying coke and whores. Lube flows like tap water.

Then the economy goes sour. It’s actually been going south for much of President Bush’s tenure in office, but he and Congress don’t do shit about it. Finally, the real estate market tanks and businesses start to default on their loans. Now, all those credit-default swaps are coming due. Just like any insurance business, the credit-default swap business plays the law of averages. But when an economic bubble just bursts as happened in real estate, a lot of swaps are all of a sudden due at the same time. This is what pushes Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy. The government does nothing to help Lehman and, in fact, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has stated that a bailout of Lehman was never an option. But when Lehman files for bankruptcy, the global credit markets freeze. That’s because, all of a sudden, a lot of debt is uninsured and creditors are afraid to extend themselves any further. When the credit markets choke, businesses can’t buy inventory or finish projects and acquisitions to which they are already committed, leading to more defaults. This is what pushes AIG to the verge of bankruptcy. Then, because it is one of the few ways of raising capital left, variable-rate bond interest shoots through the roof, pushing more businesses into insolvency. There was a domino effect. There is already lots of evidence that a different sort of global domino effect will occur if we don’t bail out the US automakers. And we haven’t even talked about how many whores are now walking the streets with nothing to do.

Maybe you still don’t feel bad. Maybe you still think that AIG and other businesses should have been better prepared. AIG should have guessed years before that, if Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the credit market would implode like a house of cards and AIG would be in serious trouble. Well, maybe. But AIG had 116,000 employees when the grips rolled out an industrial-strength fan and started throwing shit at it. The group that caused all of this trouble — the group responsible for AIG’s entire credit derivatives business and all of AIG’s heartache — always had fewer than 400 people. It’s true that the average salary of everyone in that tiny unit was more than a million bucks. So maybe you think that 116,000 people should lose their jobs and their health care and their pensions and not be able to buy crayons for their kids because 400 millionaires fucked up. If so, you will love the global depression that will occur if we don’t bail out these companies. There’s no guarantee that it’s not coming anyway. And those millionaires will still be able to buy all the porn and cake they want.

I could tell exactly the same story about Citibank. One tiny unit lost all of Citibank’s money. Pivotal in this collapse of Citibank was Robert E. Rubin. Rubin had been Treasury Secretary under Clinton, when he oversaw the removal of depression-era regulations that prevented banks from entering certain risky businesses. After Clinton, he went to Citibank and blessed their riskiest investments. Now, he’s on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team as an economic advisor. So, he still has a job. Everyone is not so lucky. All of Citibank’s roughly 370,000 employees reaped the rewards of a boom in the financial markets, including the credit market with all its complicated derivatives. But in 2008, Citibank has shed about 70,000 of those 370,000 jobs. Most of those 70,000 people did not know what a credit-default swap or a CDO was before reading this post today. And now they can’t buy their kids construction paper or pencils. If they weren’t living in the real world, they are now. But if those people weren’t living in the real world, none of us were.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not fair to blame place all the blame on the backs of a few thousand millionaires for a delusion we all shared. We all snorted lots and lots of coke and fucked two different whores everyday and bought only the fanciest cake to go with the nastiest porn.  Or something like that, right?

Oh, that reminds me: I never told you about all that I was thankful for this Thanksgiving. I have plenty for which to be thankful. The irony of this entire post is that, on January 20, 2009, this country will inaugurate a president I hope will do something about this stinking mess, in spite of Robert Rubin’s presence on the transition team. That’s about a month away, too.

So, even though the inauguration will happen too late to save a lot of people from a shitstorm of grief, one of the many things I am thankful for is that we do not have this to look forward to for the next eight years.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about waking up and wondering where the fuck I am. After two weeks of traveling, I woke up this morning and wasn’t sure where in the world my sorry ass had landed. My bedroom was cold and foreign. It was raining outside so it was mostly dark, but some mucky light still pulsed into the room through cracks in the blinds. I could tell you stories about the last two weeks, about women with thigh-highs the color of coffee ice cream and others with eyelids that sparkled like bubblegum. About meetings and meetings and meatings. But I won’t. I will tell you that, after a few minutes of laying there, I realized that a passing siren had awakened me but I still didn’t know where I was or who I was. And I imagine now that this feeling is a lot like what all of you experience when you read a blog by some anonymous dude you know nothing about besides the fact that he likes cake and porn an awful lot and is sadly without as many imaginary friends as he had once imagined he had.

I wish I could help you out here, but I can’t save you. Sorry.

I am still working on my epic project for this blog. It truly is epic but it’s also not even half done. In part, that’s because I had an epiphany about it and restarted the whole thing from scratch after Thanksgiving. It’s also in part because I have just not had much time to work on the bajillion images. But hang tight. It’s coming.

In closing, I have spent a lot of time in airplanes lately, and I would like to address the final section of this blog to a special woman.

To the woman in seat 4D of Virgin Atlantic flight VS007 on December 2nd: I was the dude seated in 3A. We made eye contact a couple of times before takeoff and you smiled shyly. Many passengers were angry with you after you had some kind of crazy, very dramatic seizure right after we got into the air because we then had to turn around. We were delayed for hours after that. Others felt sorry for you. I felt neither anger nor pity. In fact, I found the whole thing very sexy. If you flop around and bite and snort and drool and tremble like that every time you have a seizure, I think we could have a really good time together. And I couldn’t help but notice that your skirt was soaking wet afterward. Because you were kind of out of it, I did not get your number. Please contact me if you read this.

To the flight crew on that same Virgin Atlantic flight: I am not really a doctor.

That’s all I have to say about all of that.

I will try to post every week or so, but I won’t make promises I can’t keep. Not because I’m opposed to that or anything. I just don’t feel like it right now.

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