Local credit account

I moved to Sacramento in 1980. Shortly thereafter, a movie was made of my novel, Inside Moves, and for the first time in my life I had a few dollars to my name. When the house I was renting was robbed and everything I had recently acquired was stolen, I decided to buy a house in an ultrasafe neighborhood.

The California bungalow I wanted was on 38th Street near McKinley Park. The market was hot, and they wanted $80,000. My real-estate agent said I’d better move fast, so I went to get a loan from the savings and loan where I kept my recently acquired nest egg of $60,000.

“No dice,” said the loan officer. “You don’t just have bad credit, you have no credit.”

I showed him contracts for money that would soon be coming my way for a novel and a screenplay. He shrugged. “Your previous years’ tax returns show almost no income. Sorry.”

I went to four other banks. Interest rates on home loans were hovering around 11 percent. No one would loan me a penny. My real-estate agent said he knew “an aggressive lending company” that might loan me the money at 14 percent interest if I’d make a $40,000 down payment. I declined.

As it happened, the house I wanted had an outstanding mortgage of $30,000 dollars at 9.5 percent interest. By a law since changed, I could assume that loan if I came up with the other $50,000, and since I felt confident I could make $300 a month payments, I emptied my savings and bought the house.

A few years later, running low on cash, I thought, Those banks were smart not to lend to me. They knew what they were doing.

And a year after that, the savings and loan where I no longer saved my money went bust and had to be bailed out for making billions of dollars worth of bad loans. To whom, I wonder.

In 2005, barely making ends meet, no money in the bank, I qualified for a $300,000 loan to buy a house in the Berkeley. I went through the process just to see if it was true that the likes of me needed absolutely nothing to qualify for a loan. “Oh, you had a book made into a movie,” said the fellow doing the lending. “And you prune fruit trees. Wow. You’re extremely well-qualified compared to many people we’re lending to.”

Thus, the entire economy of the world is imploding because the government of the United States conspired with banks and investment firms to create a pyramid scheme of such epic proportions and falsity that trillions of dollars have been stolen from the common people of the world, and the pyramid has finally collapsed. Do not be fooled: The very people being bailed out are the creators of the dastardly scheme.