Russian feline bundled loan markets in everything

Russia’s largest bank wants to lend you a cat. Isn’t that nice?

What did you do for the good folks of Sberbank, the Moscow-based lender, that would make them want to drive a van to your home and drop off one of their 10 cats — which they keep just for occasions like this — so you can hang out with it for not more than two hours? Well, they just lent you the money for the house and, as Russian superstition has it, it’s good luck for the first creature to cross the threshold of a new home to be a feline. And, yes, the cat has to be returned to the bank.

This neighborly campaign from the friendliest of all Russian banking behemoths is a ploy to cash in on Russia’s mortgage market boom.

The cat is brought to you, and then taken away, by “two unshaven men in green overalls.”  There is more here.