A very immodest financial engineering proposal: Virginity-backed securities

This is all you need to get your virginity-backed security a AAA rating

Hey, did you hear that a 19-year-old student in New Zealand wants to auction off her virginity to pay her way through school? The Times of London explains:

“Thank you to the more than 30,000 people who viewed my ad and to the more than 1,200 offers made,” she said on the auction site yesterday. “I have accepted an offer in excess of $NZ45,000, which is way beyond what I dreamt.”

$NZ45,000! That’s about $31,000 in American funny money!

But wait! In Northern Ireland, a 16-year-old student is *also* auctioning off *her* girlhood. In the New York Daily News:

“I’m 17 at the end of the month, but I look way older. I’m tallish, size 14-ish, size 36D breasts, long browny-blonde hair. I actually have three piercings,” the teen, who the paper is not identifying, wrote.

“And by the way, I need cash-in-hand before the actual sex. I’m not up for getting conned,” she added. “And probably gonna drink a lot before or I’ll be shy, ok?”

The teen agreed to a price of $9,700.

$9,700? Are you meaning to tell me that the value of a woman’s maidenhead in Northern Ireland is about 350% less than in New Zealand?

I think I see some opportunities here. On NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross the other day, mathematician Ed Thorp, who birthed the whole ‘quant’ turn on Wall Street with his market-neutral hedging strategy to investment, warned that all the engineers and mathematicians on Wall Street are still looking for investment opportunities to slice and dice into exotic securities. You know the kind that gave us the mortgage-backed securities that sent our national economy into a tailspin.

And guys, have I got an idea for you: virginity-backed securities.

Basically, it’s risky to invest in a single virginity-related transaction all by its lonesome. After all, look at the case of ‘Natalie Dylan’ the supposed 18-year-old California girl who was supposedly going to auction off her supposed virginity to a lucky fella who would rendezvous with her for a night at Nevada’s Moonlite Bunny Ranch. The $3.7 million bid she said she had secured turned out to be as real as her pseudonym, and the last reports were that she was going to give it up for a measly million.

But if we could just bundle all of the world’s virginity-for-cash deals into a single security, investors could put money into varying tranches with a variety of payment schedules, and even if a handful of virginities turned out to be ‘toxic,’ the other consummations would more than make up for the slack.

And if it turns out that none of these virgins actually exist, that they’re all just bored girls or scurrilous journalists posting fake ads on Craig’s List, that’s why God invented AIG and credit default swaps!

This is gonna turn out awesome!