It was called Fuck You money, the type of money you burn in front of poor people just to see the hope fade from their eyes. It was the type of money you used to hire the most expensive prostitutes in America, tell them to pretend to be bankers, and have them meet for lunch in Le Bernardin in the heart of Manhattan. Each thought they were meeting a client, both were told to never break act.

I sat at the table next to theirs, twirling a stainless steel pen with the letters Goldman Sachs gilded on. The girl, Anna, was the first to arrive. A tight black skirt hugged her figure. The skirt was short, but work-appropriate short. She was the best prostitute Fuck You money could buy which meant she was the best in the world. She turned her wrist and checked a silver Rolex. It was a Daytona model. She had certainly done her research.

The guy, Brandon, soon followed. He wore a navy blue suit without a single crinkle. I glanced down at his shoes. Brooks Brothers, custom-made. It looked hand-crafted even. A smile touched my lips as he sat down and extended his hand for a handshake.

“Anna, was it?” Brandon said. “Thanks for meeting me, my name’s Brandon, VP at JPMorgan Chase, housing division.”

Anna returned him a firm shake. “Nice to meet you. I’m a VP at Merrill Lynch, risk division.”

“Look at us, if our bosses found us here. They’d have our bonuses.”

She laughed and took a sip of wine. “So, I was told that you had a business proposal for me?”

This was it, the reason I had dropped five figures on two prostitutes. Brandon would fumble through banking buzz words and financial pseudo-sciences as I sat back, laughing at his stupidity. Then Anna would follow in their dance of idiocrasy, all the way until they left La Bernadin, never to return because they couldn’t afford even its dress code. My pen twirled in anticipation.

“Credit default swaps,” Brandon said. “It’s insurance against bad loans. So if we make a string of bad investments, even when we lose, we make money, just not as much.”

Anna furrowed her brow. “I work risk at Merrill Lynch, I know how to lower risk.”

A giggle tickled my throat. What would a prostitute know about credit default swaps? He probably read the first Wikipedia paragraph and now thought himself an expert. I wondered who would be the bigger idiot, Brandon or Anna?

“What if we pair that up with thousands of high-risk loans?”

“Like we already do?” Anna asked.

“But not individually.” Brandon leaned forward, his voice lowered so I had to strain my ears just to hear his words. “We pool them all together and then securitize them into a single asset. Tell me Anna, what happens when you bundle risk?”

“It drops,” Anna said. “But those have been around for a while now. Are you proposing that we just keep doing what we’re doing?”

Brandon frowned. It looked like Anna had done more research than him. I pretended to cough to stifle my laughter. It was he who would look the fool!

“Wait,” Anna said, “but how about we talk to the ratings agencies. The bigger the pool of assets, the lower the risk. If we get a big enough pool, any sort of shitty asset could have a triple-A rating.”

My jaw dropped and I broke character by staring straight at her. The two didn’t even notice, they were so buried in their conversation.

“We can lower it further by having it asset-backed. Like a car loan,” Brandon said, his voice rising with his excitement.

“Like a mortgage!” Anna said. “We can sell janitors million dollar houses on loans they’ll never pay off, pool all those loans together, and then sell them off as a Triple-A asset before they crash and burn.”

My fingers trembled, but not with the same excitement I had purchased. They were right. Banks could securitize all these shitty mortgages and their value would rise because their ratings would, even though the risk technically stayed exactly the same. My pen dropped to the napkin in front of me and I wrote a single phrase into it before slipping it in my pocket and leaving.

/r/jraywang for daily WP stories, continuations by popular demand, and more!

Source: first top-level non-bot comment from r/WritingPrompts.