One day I went to Lidl

Continuing my love affair with all things thrift I visited a Lidl for first time in years. As you might expect the prices are pretty reasonable but not quite reasonable enough for this guy...

Afrikan boy - lidl

The rant has lahde(d)

Last weekend must read has to have been the front page of the FT weekender and Andrew Lahde's rant on 'idiot' bankers. Proving that some hedge fund managers can be pretty funny as well as very arrogant.

"The low hanging fruit, ie idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking."

"These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government."

"All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

he is now 'dropping out to spend time with his money' - you have to love that kind of honesty. The full article can be found here.

Ideas for a new business - No 1

A chain of American style sandwich shops, the business model being based on trying to undercut the current competition. The Lidl of lunches if you will.

Name yet to be decided but Suboptimal could work...

Accounting Pun-ishment

Who said studying accounting is dull? During a lecture on intangibles and takeovers I managed this rather excellent pun.

To set the scene our lecturer had just asked us all to check through a set of accounts to find out what percentage of the firms assets relate to intangibles and what sort of intangibles they were. Quick as a flash I replied to my partner - "It looks like a bit of Goodwill Hunting to me"* ho ho ho


*For those without accounting knowledge goodwill is an intangible asset, it can be thought of as the premium paid in excess of the value of identifiable assets when taking over another firm. Puns are less effective when you have to explain the punchline.

Paulson's Plea

Well I'm sure this has done the rounds but don't us Brits just love to mock the Americans when we the opportunity arises? Missy's milkshake may taste better than ours but we have a better bailout plan - we could teach you but we'd have to charge...

---------

Dear Western Man:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 700 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Post Numero One

Hmm so how do you start a blog? Do you go for deep and meaningful, try to be desperately funny or aim to shock?. I've read that if you don't catch your readers attention in the first couple of sentences then you've lost them (are you still there?). Gosh, perhaps it is just like sex and it is best to just get the first post over.

As a man working in the city (or at least the periphery) as a consultant makes my life one that is fairly unremarkable, but perhaps within that makes it somewhat identifiable. I also, for fun, have recently embarked on a masters course in finance on the premise that if you can't beat them then at least learn about them.

I oscillate at times between thinking working in finance is fantastic and wondering if I should go out and save babies. With potential financial armageddon lurking around the corner and 'black swan' events occurring almost daily it is certainly an incredibly interesting time to be working in finance. It is pretty scary when the crisis's next casualty might be Iceland, not a big country but a sovereign state none the less. There is some irony in that Iceland the frozen food company is likely to be benefiting from the troubles as people try to find ways to cut their costs. It soon may not be just Mums that shop at Iceland but out of work Lehman Brother's bankers to...



So in this blog I'll aim to share some thoughts on finance, life in the square mile (and a half), spending my part time deep in learned tomes and anything else I feel the need to rant about.