In case you didn’t already know, money is a lunatic. I always knew I was bad with cash, but what this recession shows is that the whole economy runs on the same mad principles as I do when Christmas shopping for useless tat. Here’s part of an email I got the other day:
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“Last year RBS bought ABN for $100bn. For the same price today they could have landed: Citibank for $22.5bn; Goldman Sachs, $21bn; Deutsche Bank, $13bn; Barclays, $12.7bn; Merrill Lynch, $12.3bn and Morgan Stanley, $10.5bn.
“But they would have about $8bn burning a hole in their pocket, so why not splash out on some wheels; the whole of Chrysler, Ford and GM, for instance, and even after that they’d still have enough to buy the Honda Formula 1 team.”
The camera I bought last year that’s now half the price with twice the pixels doesn’t look such a bad deal, even if it has been at the bottom of my son’s cupboard for 12 months.
What do the banks want now? More money! What does my son want? A new camera, obviously. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas all right.
