The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the revolting edition of Slate Money, your guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion, and I'm joined by my regular and awesome pants guests. There's Kathy O'Neill, the blogger at mathbabe.org. Hi, Felix. Hi, Kathy. And there's Slate's Moneybox columnist, Jordan Weissman. You know, Felix, at some point I'm going to go back through all of our archive and tally up the number of times you have said awesome pants in the course of

this show. It might be my number of the week at some point. You do that. You can come up with an

awesome pants to episode ratio. Revolting, what am I talking about? We are talking about the boom

in subprime auto loans, which sounds a bit skeevy, and Kathy's going to examine whether

indeed it is skeevy. I suspect maybe it's not as skeevy as it looks. We'll talk about the

political party of CEOs. That's an interesting phrase that came from Mark Beniof, the CEO of

Salesforce, who is part of this big push that corporate America is making against

the, quote, religious freedom laws of Arkansas and Indiana, which seem to be aimed at the

gaze. And then finally, we will talk about the stand being taken by the Guardian, the British

newspaper, which is pretty big over here too, which just became a very big backer of climate change defestment.

All that is to come.

But first, Cathy O'Neill, tell us what is happening when I buy my car and I don't have much money.

Well, okay, so here's the thing. Are you

subprime or not? Do you know? I actually do know whether or not time subprime, and probably the

answer would not surprise you. I'm guessing that you're not subprime. Subprime, by definition,

is for people with credit scores, FICO scores, below 640. I'm also guessing that most

people who are subprime don't know exactly what their FICO score is, but have a guess that they're

subprime. So it turns out all the tricks that we learned about after the fact that we're

happening in the mortgage market in the subprime mortgage market are now happening in the subprime

car market. Every single

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