It was just a routine press release about a new way to pay for food delivery. Or was it?
Apparently, it wasn’t. Social media users, especially in some financial corners, have been buzzing lately with chatter about a speculative financial product that could bring down Wall Street: the burrito loan.
What started all this? Food delivery service DoorDash (DASH) on Thursday said it was partnering with Buy Now, Pay Later provider Klarna to let users pay for their meal delivery in four interest-free installments. Some wags quickly turned to X to joke about the notion of taking months to pay for a $15 burrito. Others, however, took matters far further.
Business writer Trung Phan riffed on a scene from “The Big Short” in which Steve Carell’s character comes to realize the extent of the impending subprime mortgage crisis and the issues with collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
“The original loans are backed by burritos. [Chicken.] Pork. Carne Asada. Whatever. But Burrito CDO C is a synthetic Burrito CDO. A CDO of Burrito CDOs,” Phan wrote in a satirical post.
The comparisons to “The Big Short” and the CDOs at the core of the Global Financial Crisis didn’t end there.
But “The Big Short” wasn’t the only piece of media pulled into the fray: So was, for example, “The White Lotus.”
Personal finance expert and radio personality Dave Ramsey was another fixture of the meme parade.
Ramsey himself even weighed in, effectively summing up the internet’s reaction to the buy now, pay later burrito.