The closer

I was traveling on business, doing a few-day stint in middle America between assignments in the Caribbean and the west Pacific.

And that’s when I noticed her. She was the only Filipina I’ve ever seen in that particular city.

She was nervous. She kept patting her hair. Her husband, also Filipino, looked ill at ease in his necktie. He played with the knot and fidgeted. He clutched an envelope and tapped it on the tabletop absently.

They were perhaps 35 or 40 years old, obviously hard-working middle class. I had a table near their booth in the cafe. They were waiting for somebody. I’m not the nosy type, but when I saw who they were waiting for my antennae perked up.

A few minutes later he walked in. He sported a thick gold chain around one wrist, wore a cheap shopping mall suit, and was attended by a haze of drugstore aftershave. He was big but nimble, and looked like he played football at some junior college maybe 15 years ago. A scrape or two with the law wasn’t out of the question.

He was a closer.

He dropped a few friendly, but pointed, hints about how important he was and how limited his time was. They were grateful that this nice man would meet them at the cafe, instead of making them drive all the way to his office (which I’m sure didn’t exist). Lucky for them he just happened to have business in the neighborhood, so he could “fit them in” to his pressing, high-powered schedule.

As I connected the dots, I surmised that I was seeing the couple getting swindled out of their life savings. Peering backwards to set the stage, I reckoned that a Pitch Man had sold them on the “investment” scam, probably a matter of days before, and now the closer was moving in for the kill.

Just to head off any last minute dissent, the Closer, oozing friendliness, smoothly boxed in the wife with rhetorical questions. Having worked hard as a registered nurse, working overtime to provide for her family’s future, didn’t she want the peace of mind that financial security (the “investment”) would bring?

She did.

And wouldn’t she like the finer things in life, such as shopping, vacations, and cruises?

She would. Especially the cruises. She had never taken a cruise. The Caribbean, they all agreed, sounded nice.

And didn’t she want to send her children to the best school and colleges?

Of course.

As easy as that was, the husband was an even easier mark. He was saturated in American pop-culture money talk, which plugs the U.S. airwaves, bookstores and magazine racks. He wanted a “piece of the action.”

So he lapped it up when the Closer said things like “aggressive stance” and “reinvested capital gains.” The husband was relishing his role as a player of high finance, enjoying his status in his wife’s eyes as a kitchen-table genius. The Closer played it well. After dropping a buzzword or two to tickle the husband’s ego, the Closer would say to the wife, “Sorry to get so technical here, you can ask your husband about it later, he’s obviously real smart about business.”

As for the “investment” itself, from what I could glean it was a comical collage of blue sky and horse crap, artfully arranged so it probably wouldn’t attract immediate regulatory attention.

The check was for a bit over $60,000. The Closer was in and out in about 12 minutes.

Having handed over the envelope with the check in it, the husband had nothing to tap on the table. So he fidgeted with his necktie some more, then loosened it now that their important meeting was over.

Here’s the big picture: Nobody can understand “investments” and “investing” without understanding the psychology of what I witnessed. This psychology, be it with small, cheesy schemes, or big “legitimate” ones, is what fuels bubbles and, of course, the crashes. Entire books are written about it, but I’m happy to take a whack at it in 800 words.

Still, for some reason, seeing an apparently decent, hard-working Filipino couple blindly leaping into the American “investment” frenzy, well, it was odd. Hopefully it is rare, but the Closer was so good at his approach that I wondered if he and his cohorts were working a network of stateside Filipinos.

Twelve minutes. That’s all it took.
[I] Ed is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday. Visit Ed at TropicalEd.com and SaipanBlog.com.[/I]