Financial Betting Articles

Winston Churchill once said, "America can always be relied upon to do the right thing - once it has exhausted all the other options." As I survey the Socialist Republic of North America this weekend I can't help but be struck by one undeniable - one indefatigable! (oh how I lie awake at night wanting to use that word) - fact. There are no rules.

There is no rhyme or reason.

There is just crisis management.

It goes something like this:

Well, anything the Yanks can do we can do a pale imitation of. Not for us the ruthless Lehmanesque bankruptcy of Bradford and Bingley. No bank or building society is too small or too incompetently run for New Labour to save for the purposes of a few votes. (Still, Brown and other members of the Keystone Cabinet still managed to hand a political gift to David "Karaoke" Cameron with the nationalisation occurring on the eve of his party's conference.)

But let us not confuse this with a unified strategy towards the overextended operations that pass for our banking system. If we ran our businesses the way they clearly have their's, well, would they have kept us afloat?

A true story:

A friend of mine runs a business. He is normally in credit but occassionally goes into the red (you know, the colour of all those bank shares). So they call him in recently and say, fine, we'll continue with this arrangement that you've had with us for over 10 years but we want a written guarantee. Fine, my friend says, but then I want a written guarantee from you guys for when I'm in credit. He figures they're more likely to go pop than he is so a reciprocal deal seems appropriate.

Did they:

a) Sign up on the spot?

b) Ask if they could get back to him?

c) Continue with the arrogant double-standards that banks used to be able to get away with?

Answers on Zimbabwean dollars, please.

FTSE was down by 222.80 points last week

Wall Street was down by 251.29 points last week

DAX was down by 125.08 points in the last week

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using only the letters on one row of the keyboard

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