A 2014 Gift of the Magi

    11

    A giant Manhattan penthouse and a summer home in the Hamptons. That was all. There was nothing Sabrina could do but plop onto her designer couch and cry.
    Christmas was a week away, but Sabrina didn’t have enough money to buy the one gift her husband, Beckett, had dreamed of: hair transplants.
    Beckett, meanwhile, had been desperate to scrape $20,000 together to buy Sabrina the Christmas gift she longed for: saline implants.
    But money was tight. True, their fortunes had improved dramatically since the economic collapse of 2008. As the housing bubble burst and a massive correction rippled through the world’s economies, Sabrina found herself out of work.
    Beckett also lost his job in 2008. As an investment banker at a large New York firm, his risky investments, and occasional illegal dealings, lost billions for his employer. It’s amazing he wasn’t in jail.
    As the massive flow of commission checks and bonuses halted, Sabrina and Beckett lost their penthouse and summer home to foreclosure.
    “It’s not fair!” said Sabrina, sobbing.
    Fortunately, Sabrina and Beckett would not suffer for long — because Wall Street would not suffer for long.
    Wall Street banks were too big to fail, after all — their failure would have sent the economy into an unimaginable tailspin that would have had an effect greater than the Great Depression.
    The Federal Reserve began buying up the bad debt the banks were holding — or laundering that bad debt, as some economists refer to it — essentially whitewashing the many bad business decisions, some of them criminal, that the bankers had made.
    Former Federal Reserve official Andrew Huszar, who managed the Fed’s $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed-security buying spree, explained in The Wall Street Journal that the Fed’s “quantitative easing” (QE) has been enriching Wall Street bankers at the expense of the public.
    “The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time … . The banks hadn’t just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They’d also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.”
    Sabrina and Beckett surely benefited from the Wall Street windfall.
    Beckett was soon making huge commissions and bonuses as an investment banker. Sabrina was soon making big commissions, too, selling real estate to wealthy bankers.
    The two had almost made a full recovery to regain their lavish, pre-2008 lifestyle. But since their credit hadn’t yet fully recovered, they had to make sizable down payments to buy back their penthouse and summer home. That is why they lacked the funds for Christmas gifts.
    But then Sabrina got an idea. She knew a mortgage broker and appraiser who could overstate the value of her penthouse so she could get an inflated home-equity loan!
    When Christmas Eve arrived, Sabrina explained to Beckett how she was able to secure the money she needed to pay for his hair transplants.
    Beckett began laughing uncontrollably.
    “What is so funny?” said Sabrina.
    “You didn’t need to borrow against the penthouse,” he said. “My bank did so well this year, my bonus was big enough to pay for your saline implants!”
    “Oh, Beckett!”
    Suddenly, Sabrina noticed something different about her husband’s male-pattern baldness: It was gone!
    “What happened to your hair?” she said.
    “My bonus was so big, I had enough to fly to Beverly Hills to have my hair implants done!”
    Sabrina and Beckett laughed at all the unnecessary trouble Sabrina had gone through the previous week.
    It was a Merry Christmas after all.
    —–
    ©2014 Tom Purcell. Tom Purcell, author of “Misadventures of a 1970’s Childhood” and “Comical Sense: A Lone Humorist Takes on a World Gone Nutty!” is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist and is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. For info on using this column in your publication or website, contact Sales@cagle.com or call (805) 969-2829. Send comments to Tom at Purcell@caglecartoons.com.

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    11 COMMENTS

      • If you want to skip the history lesson on our monetary system, you can jump ahead to section 14 and start there.

        • Good read! Raised up first 20 year of my life believing in the bank being honest, beings they were FDIC insured. Last 35 years hating them!

      • Very interesting but nothing new. Bankers are nothing without crooked politicians. This whole article to a degree, the way it is written and spun, appears to be a sympathy piece for Obama. Obama was and is still over his head.

    2. And the republicans want to give them a new golden ticket to rape the American economy.

      • Appears so! It is a shame that people are not going “postal” on these no good SB’s in that pyramid scheme of Wall street/ banking systems.

        • Greed is costly and has consequences. The Madoff scheme is nothing but a con man’s way of getting someone else’s money. I have never had a bank do me wrong, I always received exactly what I signed up for, nothing more nothing less. I’ve always had simple loans with simple payment plans that I could meet. There are laws that protect you from crooked banks, but there are no laws that protect us from a combination of crooked politicians and crooked bankers. That is what we are currently facing in Evansville at this time. Gail and other upcoming politicians are part of the same old gang.

      • Seems the liberal democrats helped in order to save their investments. The most honest congressman that this area produced in the last 50 years was John Hostettler and the liberal democrats were to ignorant to see it. Clinton paved the way, Bush carries it on and ignorant Obama propped it up. We get what we deserve, I hate to see a working family lose but when people go over their heads for appearance I find by sympathy lacking.

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