Thursday, October 15, 2009

Those wacky bankers ...

I recently came across a whiz-bag-guffaw-a-minute-gem of financial comedy written by British funny-man and "Hottie from History" designator extraordinaire, Andy Zaltzman.

(actual photo ... he really looks like this ... I mean, fire shoots out of the back of his head)

The book is titled, intriguingly enough, "Does Anything Eat Bankers?: And 53 Other Indispensable Questions for the Credit Crunched." As far as I can tell from the short snippets Amazon lets me view free of charge (never enough ... NEVER enough), it looks to be ... wait for it ... tear-inducingly hilarious. My favorite quote (thus far) is included below:

High street banks began behaving increasingly tittishly towards their customers, offering their savers lower rates of interest than a 50-volume encyclopedia of socks, and fining them for being financially unsuccessful – when Muddy Waters bluesily mused that “you can’t lose what you never had,” he had clearly never been £1 over his overdraft limit for twenty minutes

In a further blot on Waters’s already minimal reputation as a financial adviser, the Credit Crunch has now proved conclusively that: (a) you quite clearly can lose what you never had; (b) you can also lose what no-one every had; and (c) the time has come to try to stop losing stuff as a general rule. Waters may have been the ‘Father of Chicago Blues,’ and to listen to a single wordless murmur of his voice may be to imbibe liquefied elemental truth, but the time has come to reassess the economic reliability of his lyrics.

That Zaltzman is such a kidder. Golly bob howdy.

1 comment:

Liz Merket said...

It feels so good to laugh about the financial status of the world. There has been to much sadness and anger. So, I for one appreciated your post and am thinking about buying a copy of the book.