He puts it in black and I lean over and swoop it to red.
“Read the details,” I say. “A formerly rich guy in a desperate attempt to hang on to something. His personal credit rating sucks. Everyone knows Florida won’t take your house in a Chapter Eleven. He’s done and the loan is trash.”
I pull up the next one. “Dental practice in Wenatchee, Washington state, became overextended on their dental equipment purchases. They cater to the indigent,” I read.
“Excellent clientele to seek your fortune from,” Henry says sarcastically, pulling it to red. “Maybe migrant farm workers really didn’t want to purchase teeth laminates.”
“You sound like an ass.”
“I’m a humor-seeking ass. What we’re trying to do here is find a plug for this flood. We aren’t here to save humanity. We can’t.”
“I’m drowning in the debt of other people, Henry,” I say. “I think of these people and this situation far into the night. These people who were just numbers on a spreadsheet now haunt me.”
Henry puts his hand on my back and rubs the right spot between my shoulder blades. I really shouldn’t let him do this, but it feels right to have human contact, possibly the only human not mad at me right now.
“Look at this one,” I say. “Former librarian, has lived in the house for thirty-two years, refinanced to pay for medical care, now unemployed, no income.” The human crisis on the other end of these trades is making it harder to hold it together. The staggering amount of debt that banks have drummed up sits with people who can’t pay it back and why isn’t anyone talking about this? It isn’t possible to bring this stuff up at work without looking like a traitor. The newspapers barely mention it. Henry and Kathryn Peterson are my only outlets and she won’t talk about it. That just leaves Henry.
He continues dragging and dropping with his outstretched arms alongside my own, like a father helping a kid steer an amusement park ride that dips and lifts and almost crashes but as of yet has not.
CHAPTER 32
Consumption
WHEN I RETURN to the office, I find even fewer buyers for CDOs and CMOs than even one week ago. The stock market has been having intraday swings that are abnormally large only to finish up close to where it started.
Back when I first started working, the Securities and Exchange Commission enforced something called an uptick rule, a rule that had been around since the 1930s. Any trader who was selling short, meaning taking a bet that a stock was going to fall, could only add to a short position after an uptick in the stock price, meaning the stock price moved slightly higher on the last trade. This severely lessened the chances of a stock collapsing. If a stock ticked up once, meaning there was a buyer out there, then someone else could sell that stock without owning it. Now stocks can be sold uncovered, nothing borrowed against the sale, all day long and I recall watching Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, speak on a news show. She was railing against the possibility of this rule being taken away. Less chaos in the market means fewer trades, but yes, a woman seemed to be the only one who could foresee that market order is more desirable than more money in her account. In just a few months the uptick rule would be tossed to the curb.
I notice the number of uncovered shorts we own, the stocks that are sold that nobody really owns, is ticking up quickly. The stock market seems poised to do something dramatic and not good.
To keep maintaining a somewhat active market, Feagin Dixon buys back the CDOs and CMOs that Henry and other institutional investors owned. Granted, we’re giving him less than he wants but still, it’s a lot of money and we’re left with possibly worthless bonds. I try to calm myself, telling myself stories of these things having AAA ratings and insurance and backstops in the event of a calamity, but my mind can’t still itself when I look at these screens.