Chapter 30.5: Boxing in the Office (Patreon)

Chapter 30.5: Boxing in the Office

Dunshire Equities, LA. September 2007.

“Take a seat.”

“...This is my office, Bas. You take a seat.” Would you look at that? Not only had my ever indefatigable financial advisor Ben gotten himself a brand spanking new office suite with all the works, apparently he’d also gotten himself a brand new attitude. Something a little more spiny than whiny. 

One aspect of him that hadn’t changed, however, in the few months of my absence, was his consistently poor diet. “Papa John’s, Domino’s, and Pizza Hut?” One by one I lifted the lid of each box; Papa John’s was still warm and fresh, but the other two had probably been sitting here for a few hours if not a day or two, if the abandoned slices and thick grease stains were any sign. 

“Variety is the spice of life.” Ben stacked, shimmied, and thumped a thick pile of papers on his desk. 

Seeing as we were about to have a long discussion about my bread, I got comfortable with a fresh slice of dough topped with an exorbitant amount of cheese and chomped down.

Anita predictably had an urge to sink her teeth in as well. “If that means variety to you, how diversified is Bas’ portfolio, then?” 

“Easy there, wicked witch of West Hollywood. Let our cowardly lion here keep his courage for a couple of minutes before you tear him down to pieces, will you?” 

“Oh yeah? And who exactly are you meant to be in this analogy?” An eyebrow shot up - her fin was suddenly circling me. 

“If you’re going to be that dumb, then I’m going to change your moniker to the scarecrow.” Having attended the Steve Irwin school of animal preservation, I was devoid of any of it myself. Of course, I was gonna poke the shark. Do you think we should consider Steve The Wizard of Oz in this scenario? “I’m Dorothy and this is my adventure! Isn’t that right, tin man?” No reason to leave Cadbury out of the fun… although those knitting needles were looking rather sharp.

“More like Toto.” Gasp! Was she calling me a yuppie dog, or just plain barking mad? Either way, it took everything to not let the tears stream down my face and rain over Africa. 

Wait… wrong Toto.

“You’re going to get sent straight to hell if you keep clicking your heels like that, Bas.” 

“Fine, fine. So tell me, where have you hidden my gold on this yellow brick road?” All three sets of eyes were ready to drop the house on me. Last one, I promise!

“We’ll hit your box office earnings first. Your TV show cameos weren’t worth the paper the cheque was written on. You made zero from that entire thing since you spent it all on the private jet charter flights. At least Tropic Thunder was a worthwhile salary. They paid you 3.5 million of which you got to keep a little less than 1.7 after your usual obligations. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but with the fact that you only had 17 mill liquid on your account, it was a good bump.” The deluge of digits descended from ben’s brimming books.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, what am I missing here? Isn’t he supposed to have 67 mill floating around? That’s the number I remember from last time.” Let the man finish, Anita.

“Sure, but you’re forgetting that I finally bought the 50 million in mortgage-backed-securities credit default swaps over the last couple of months. We’ll get to that later, though.”

“Yeah, I’m more interested in how Phoenix performed at the box office. I haven’t had time to check it yet.” Speaking of, I better get to reading the copy I got via Emma before I meet Rowling soon. 

“One-point-two billion in gross revenue since July. Just fyi - over 400 million of that was within the first five days. Once the fiscal year ends with September. You’ll get 4 percent of that pool according to your agreement with WB. So in a few days you’ll see a nice deposit of 48 million dollars, of which you get to keep 36 million after the government and all involved parties take their cut. I’m going to be totally honest, the numbers sound great, but you really, really needed this injection of cash. I think it’s about time we talked about the elephant in the room.”

The global economy was about to become a zoo. Sharks, lions, and elephants aside, it was time to visit the bear and bull exhibits. “Any chance we can put that tasty 36 into another batch of swaps?”

“No.” Just no.

“Come on, how about another cheeky 20 at least? Let’s not pretend that the rest of the firm hasn’t cottoned on to this scheme. We just need to keep away from Bear Stearns and the Lehman Brothers.” It’s better to hide among the leaves with more grapes on the vines.

“The banks have already hiked the premiums on all CDSs. Your monthly interest will be sky high.”

“Look, my wallet’s fat again. I can take the hit; it’s just another 6 months. We’ll know to sell when the banks offload their seedy CDOs and then come begging at our door to secure their own short positions. Regardless of whatever our premium payments were, we’ll make them bleed for even more.” Spend enough time with sharks and you’ll develop a taste for blood, too.

His sigh was short but long suffering. “Fine, I’ll see if I can get another 20 on the books.”

“CDOs, CDSs, it all sounds like gibberish to me. You know what I think MBS stands for? Major bullshit. Can someone who doesn’t speak finance douche explain it to me?”

It seemed a demonstration was in order. 

Hands dusted of crumbs, I grabbed the box of Papa John’s - that I’d already eaten half of - and plunked it on the table in front of Anita. “Anybody want a slice?” A round of nos. “Hmm, I’m full too. So what do we do about this pizza?” 

“What do you mean? Put it in the fridge.” Her fresh manicure shooed me away. 

“Then what do I do about the other two pizzas? Do I put them in the fridge too?”

“What? No. Just throw them away.”

“Surely we can salvage this. Here, I have a good idea.” All the disparate slices from the other two boxes sitting on the counter were added to the leftover Papa John’s forming a full pie. “Now, isn’t this an elegant solution? I have an untouched pizza ready to eat.”

“Sure, Right until you eat the wrong slice and end up crapping your pants, idiot.”

“Exactly! You get it now, don’t you? This Frankenstein Pizza is a CDO. It doesn’t matter that it’s in a new box with a few fresh slices; the rest of it is dog shit. Just like I’ve done with the pizza, the banks have done with the American housing market.”

“O-oh…” Anita stammered in shock, Ben frowned in resignation, and Cadbury ceased her knitting. I wasn’t done, though. 

“Morally, I should toss this in the rubbish, but that’s a little wasteful, don’t you think? Ben spent money on all three pizzas. Rather than calling this a loss, how about I try to make some profit off of it?” Doing my best impression of a pizza delivery guy, I shut the lid, tucked in all the corners, and held the box aloft like a sommelier. “Ben, who’s that fat guy across the corridor from you?”

“Huh? Oh, that’s Gerry.”

“He like pizza?”

“Sure, who doesn’t?”

“Phenomenal. Here’s what I’m going to do.” I glided over to the room’s kitchenette and patted the top of the microwave. “The rating agencies. I own them, they have one job: to warm up my food. It doesn’t matter what that food is. If chef mic here plans to stay in business, he has no choice but to heat what I’ve put inside him. Otherwise, it’s easy for me just to walk down the hall to the larger kitchen and use the oven there. So now not only does my pizza look fresh, it’s hot to the touch too. If I take this over to Gerry, I’m sure I can get a few bucks out of him.”

“But that’s fraud.”

“Correct. But you’re too late. I’ve already fooled myself, and everyone else, into thinking I have a new product.”

“I could tattle.”

“Go ahead, but what’s Gerry going to believe? The hot cheese scalding the roof of his mouth or a stranger telling him that his purchased pizza isn’t good for him? Gerry’s fat for a reason, Anita. I’m just giving him what he wants, and he’s happy to pay me for it.”

Mortgage-backed-securities don’t sound like so much BS anymore.

“You’ve seen my crooked dealings come to light. How does that make you feel about me?”

“Like you’re an amoral, greedy crook.” No more heart of gold, eh? 

“Right. And what do you think is going to happen to Gerry if he eats this pizza?”

“He’s either going to have a serious case of diarrhea or a serious heart attack.” Thank you, Dr Specter.

“Wanna bet? Tell you what, I’m so confident that nothing’s gonna happen that I’m going to sell you health insurance on Gerry for the price of the pizza. For every bite he takes, you pay me a dollar until he finishes the thing. But if at any point, while he’s mowing it down, he soils himself or his ticker conks out, I owe you x times the amount I sold him the pizza for.” That in very basic and bready terms is what a CDS is.

“There’s gotta be better ways of making money than this. We’re profiting off human suffering.”

“When I first started this job, my boss told me one thing. In the pursuit of green, your hands are going to get very red.” Ben sprinkled some oregano.

“Money or morals. It’s one or the other.” Cadbury had the chilli flakes.

“I’ll have all the time in the world to balance my karma ledger. But right now, I’m being handed a winning lottery ticket.” And I had the bill.

“Win the lottery, sure. Second you do that, the feds and the speds alike are gonna come crawling.” I wonder if there was such a thing as scoff syrup available in pharmacies because my skeptical agent sure could use some.

“If I’m completely candid, you’re not wrong. There are safer and better ways of making this sort of money using the markets. But the opportunity cost of not doing the quote unquote sensible thing is not worth the cost of opportunity.”

Anita closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair, and rubbed the sides of her forehead. The full body migraine I could see coming on and gave new meaning to treating your body like a temple. “But then, what about all your other investments? Couldn’t you just put more money into those instead?”

“Absolutely, and they’re performing really well, too. When combining all the funds and stocks from Netflix and other blue chip tech stocks that I invested in with Bas’ approval, we have experienced cumulative year-on-year growth averaging at about 70% over the last three-ish years. But the difference is that this sort of growth takes eons.”

Theoretically, if I used my MacGuffin despite how unreliable it had undoubtedly become with the sheer number of butterfly wings that had flapped with every breath I’d taken. There was still an infinitesimal chance I could become a multi-billionaire by year’s end just because I’d be able to time the markets with the precision of a Valjoux movement. But if I was even slightly wrong - all it takes is a minute hitch in the gears and coils - I’d be pauper in moments. 

“I need money now. My nest egg is secure, Anita. Give it a decade or two; I’ll have more gold than a Gringott’s dragon can guard.”

But what was the point of being a dragon wasting away inside a cave defending my hoard of gold from the IRS and any other entity who wants to rend chunks out of my hard earned money? I’d rather soar on unladen wings if that was the only alternative.

“Potter isn’t going to last forever. The books are over. There’s only a few years of the movies left. And we’ve also seen this year just what sort of pay I get for other parts as well, major and minor. It doesn’t come close. If I want to retain the earning capacity and even a semblance of the creative control that I’ve had with the Harry Potter franchise in some ways, I’m going to have to fund it myself - at least in part. And for that to be possible, I need liquidity, I need a lot of it, and I need it on hand. Which is why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s the best of both worlds.” You tell ‘em Hannah Montana. 

“Oh, ending reminds me, we still need to get back to Uniqlo about the renewal offer.” Should I buy Ben a Segway?

“How much of that did I have again?”

“The agreement was penned in ‘04. You bought 1.5 million in shares at 6 USD per share and then when you signed on for the endorsement deal, they gifted you another 4.5 million USD in shares. You hold a full 1% of the company in your name.” Maybe a Uniqlo gift card would be more forgiving on my dwindling savings.

“And what’s the share price today?”

“It fell a bit after the stock split, but it’s back up to about 24 USD a share as of this month.” The Harry Potter merch was treating them very well. That 6 milli from 3 years ago is now worth 24 and it’s only going to grow. 

“What’s the new offer?”

“Same basic terms. 10 mil over 5 years. Equity or cash your choice in whatever fractions you want.”

“Nah, just keep it simple, equity’s all I want from them. 10 is too low, ask for 20 - and when they negotiate don’t go under 16.”

“Sounds good.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Anita clamped her hands over her ears. “Please, no more maths today. I can’t take it anymore!”

Damn girl, you asked!