Assets for sale!

[donation]

By joel Thurtell

Just came back from a reconnaisance mission.

In my garage.

The news is good!

I have assets for sale, too. Just like those big Wall Street banks.

I heard this trillion dollar federal bailout of the investment industry is spreading the wealth far and wide. It started out with bad mortgages the government was going to buy up to make sure the banks that wrote all that bad paper and deserved to fail would instead live and breathe and prosper.

But now every investment bank with any kind of bad investment paper is getting into the act. This is the land of opportunity!

According to my pal Bert Ely, any kind of asset will do. Bert was quoted in the September 22, 2008 New York Times because he’s “a financial services industry consultant in Alexandria, Virginia.” I don’t really know Bert, but I’d like to, cause he’s barking right up my tree.

Here’s what the Times said about Bert: “Mr. Ely said the open-ended nature of the Treasury’s plan could be interpreted to mean that the government was open to acquiring ‘any asset, anywhere in the world.’ ”

Bert is my kind of guy. When I read the government would buy “any asset, anywhere in the world,” the first place I thought of was my garage.

Man, have I got a lot of assets out there.

An old Schwinn bike, a big can of sunflower seeds for the birds, some power tools like a band saw, a table saw, a shaper and a router, lots of sailboat hardware like cam cleats, turnbuckles, silicon bronze and stainless steel screws of all sizes, an old desk we don’t have room for in the house, a little table that got squeezed out of the shed, four or five long extension cords, one with an incandescent light bulb at an end, various pieces of ham radio equipment I couldn’t unload on eBay, a car jack, some old rakes that are pretty worn out, a short-handled shovel and lots more.

Most of these assets, I think, are worth more than the derivatives my Wall Street colleagues are hawking to the government.

Here’s my plan: I’m going to make up some really high prices for these things. (Oh, by the way, I’ve got tons of old books, too!) I’m going to sell them to the government and maybe discount them a little bit. But I’ll more than make up the difference by charging the government a brokerage fee which I deserve for making this swell deal possible.

Do me a favor: Don’t tell anybody else about my plan. If other people start selling their garage junk to the government, I may be squeezed out.

Drop me a line at joelontheroad.com