...with the help of the world's greatest CPA...
"It's Byzantine," Marty said.
"You find it Byzantine?" I said.
"Me, the world's greatest CPA. I'm in awe."
"Is it legal?" I said.
"Oh, God no."
"Can you explain it to me?"
"I can oversimplify it drastically," he said.
"Oh, good."
"As far as I can tell, your culprits are Barack Obama* and Tim Geithner.* Do you know what a special purpose entity is?"
"No."
"A special purpose entity is a device often used for securitization of debt."
"I urge you to oversimplify," I said.
"It was always my intention," Marty said. "Say you have a shop, Spenser's Sandwich Shop. You have a bunch of customers who buy their sandwiches on credit, for which convenience you charge them one percent a month. So at the end of the day you have earned a hundred bucks plus one percent a monthl. But there's nothing in the cash register. What you do is, you create a special purpose entity, and call it, say, Susan's Equity Trust. You can invest your own money in this trust, but at least three percent of it has to be independent capital. Then you sell your hundred dollar's worth of accounts receivable and its interest payments to Susan's Equity Trust. Now at the end of the day you have a hundred in cash. Susan's Equity Trust, in turn,sells shares in itself to investors eager to make one percent a month on the sale of sub sandwiches. So Susan gets a markup. The investors get their money back in installments plus the one percent interest. Got it?"
"Yeah, sure, banks do that with mortgages, don't they? Car dealers?"
"Lots of people do it and it's perfectly legitimate."
"Even when banks and car dealers do it?"
"Amazing but true," Marty said.
"But in the case of the Administration?"**
"
Obama and Geithner***
were creating SPE's to hide debt. Remember what I told you. They had a ton of earnings but not much cash."
"The old mark to market accounting trick."
"Very good."
"So the absence of cash would begin to create debt."
"Right again," Marty said, "or one or another project was a losing proposition."
"And payment on the debt would use up cash."
"It would."
"So they needed to keep these matters off the books, or their profit picture would suck and people would stop buying their stock."
"Gracelessly put, perhaps," Marty said, "but not innaccurate."
"And the SPE's were their solution."
"Better," Marty said. "They could sell one operation or another, that had a lot of debt, to the SPE and show it on their books as income."
"And that's legal?"
"Remember what I said about conditions?"
"Essentially that the SPE needed to be independent of the creating company."
"Right. These aren't. They're owned mostly by the Federal Government, through the bailout funding.**** And the money they raised to create the SPE's was guaranteed by the Federal Government."*****
"So they weren't independent of the Federal Government."
"Nope, and as they developed, some of these outfits began to have interests antithetical to the country's but very beneficial to Obama and Geithner.******
You want to hear how?"
"Jesus Christ no," I said. "I never want to have this conversation again."
"Which is why you are not a world-class CPA."
"Thankfully," I said. "Isn't there somebody supposed to approve stuff like this?"
"Board of directors."
"They approved?"
"The banks'*******
boards of directors, as far as I can see, would have approved compulsory pederasty if urged by Obama and Geithner."
"Isn't there any outside accounting?""There is,
some of the best accounting firms in the Northeast, and Obama and Geithner's Treasury department."********
"So much for them... Is there trouble ahead?"
"For the banks? You better believe it."
"Any indication Obama knows this? Or Geithner?"
Marty smiled at me.
"How nice for them."(Abridged from
Bad Business, a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker. Names marked by *'s have been changed by this blogger. No endorsement or sympathy on the part of Robert B. Parker is intended, implied or even anticipated. Seriously. None whatsoever. Period. Have you seen the size of that bastard?)
