A loan shark, a ninja and the sub-prime market

The global credit crunch has hit Rabid Reseller pretty hard.

Well, to be more precise Uncle Tony hit us pretty hard when we told him we couldn’t make the interest payments.

To be totally precise his cousin Vinnie was the one who hit us pretty hard, but he said it was a message from Uncle Tony.

Serves us right for marrying into a migrant family in the first place.

It seems you just can’t trust people from Victoria, no matter how long they’ve been living north of the border.

We knew his offer of a low-interest loan via some friends of his in the USA was too good to be true.

Four percent interest – that’s lower than inflation around here – or at least it’s lower than the rate at which we inflate our prices before we hold one of our annual stock clearance sales at the end of each month.

Anyway, we thought his friends over there could take care of themselves, what with being ninjas – they’re known for standing up to anybody.

Of course, as usual, things got lost in translation, particularly since things got translated by the nephew.

Turns out that ‘ninja’ is another one of those American acronyms like NASA and FNMAE.

Yeah, that’s what we said, we’d heard of NASA – they do the space flights thing. And FNMAE is pronounced Fannie Mae so there’s the money lending connection.

And it turns out that ninja means ‘no income – no job’, which seems to have been the major lending criteria in use over there.

Anyway, that’s where Uncle Tony sourced our loan and now he’s telling us it was sub-prime so we have go out and get an ordinary loan from a local bank, so we can pay back the ninjas…ahh…Fannie Mae…ahh...somebody over there.

While waiting to see the bank manager we picked up the newspaper and there’s the US President saying he’s going to give their banks $700 billion to help them out.

Yep, you read that right – $700,000,000,000.

At that point we just walked out of there – surely nobody’s going to notice our paltry $350K loan when there’s all that loot sloshing around in the bank vaults.

They’ll be way too busy partying. Well, we certainly would be. That’s a shedload of zeroes! That’s a shedload of money! Of course we should have known better.
We should have known much better.

Uncle Tony’s source of funds wasn’t Fannie Mae after all, it was Freddie Mac. But not the bank – the Scottish loan shark from Brooklyn.

Who knew they had sharks in New York? And he’s not happy.
Well, to be honest, which he hardly ever is, he’s always unhappy.

But now he’s even less happy. Uncle Tony convinced him to lend us the money in Aussie dollars, what with the exchange rate being almost one-for-one anyway. Two months later and Freddie’s looking at a 20 percent loss on paper.

It’s only called a paper loss because he lost the paper he signed agreeing to the loan being in Aussie dollars.

So now we owe him 20 percent more than we borrowed in the first place. Plus the 10 percent fee which Uncle Tony charged us retrospectively for ‘grief management’ – if we pay it he hopes we’ll manage to avoid too much grief from Freddie’s relatives when they visit later this month to collect their money, which apparently needs to be real cash in actual US dollars.

They want a special kind of US dollars that they call “small denomination unmarked used bills”.

They might speak English over there, but it’s really not the same as the language we use here, that’s for sure.
Global finance.

Who needs it? And more importantly, how can we avoid it?

Gotta go! America calling!

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