This was sent to me earlier in the week by the finance dept of a multi-national company;-

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95 .

With HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5.

However if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214.

So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice seems to be drink heavily and re-cycle.

Amen, brother!

WE MUZ HAV 1 TWO!!1

Please, please, PLEASE stop blindly following America into every poorly thought out, badly researched, knee-jerk scheme they come up with.

Don't buy the Aircraft carrier, don't make the child database, don't roll out national ID cards, and SAVE THAT £250bn. Put it into the NHS, reducing taxes, and for God's sake let the free market stabilise naturally instead of trying to force it with frozen interest rates and bail-out plans for failing small businesses.

... they won't have any cash left for ID cards and other bollocks...

> However if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214.

I believe your story originated with American names and dollar amounts.

But even so, show me the aluminium recycling plant that would pay £214 for ~1000 aluminium cans!

Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the run on HBOS in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.

In the last 7 hours Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches. Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived.

Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black. Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.

> show me the aluminium recycling plant that would pay £214 for ~1000 aluminium cans!

Oh, for heaven's sake, stop being such a pain! It's funny, it says a lot about how much stocks are currently valued, and franckly, you know what? Who cares!

I am spreading this joke around... the best I have seen in a long long time, and we all need a good laugh! :)

Paris 'cause I say so!

> ...show me the aluminium recycling plant that would pay £214 for ~1000 aluminium cans!

If you spent a grand on beer and ended up with only 1000 cans of Tennants, then you thoroughly deserve the Northern Rock shares you could've bought instead!

Why aren't they handing their massive bonuses and other perks back as a sign of contrition? Why am *I* bailing them out of *their* mess?

The banks have all lent or borrowed too much, so the govt. is going to lend them more, so they can keep borrowing and lending to er... Wait. What's wrong with this picture?

Throwing good money after bad. Horse bolted, jerking of knees and so on...

The credit crunch and banking crisis will have almost no effect on British SMEs bacuase they got no financial support from the banks anyway.

Britian is a medium sized country with an Imperial sized financial infrastructure, yet, UK businesses have always found it hard to raise capital or get reasonably priced credit.

Even in the boom times a request for funding say a new software business would always be met with an "Of course you can have the money we, just need your house for security and that will be an extra two percent interest as you are self employed".

As banks are now funded by UK tax payers can we please make it ilegal for banks to give all our money to the next American con man who bamboozles them with a power point presentation.

FTA

"The Treasury believes there is no need for Parliamentary legislation for the multi-billion bailout to go ahead."

Because if they did that, then the figure would be set in stone.

"The figure of £250bn in financing is thought to be a fluid one, essentially plucked from the air and liable to change as the situation changes."

Would have to be able to go up or down as the situation changes, which is why it cannot be set in stone.

Give the Treasury free reign to give away money and insure loans and debts as it sees fit?

Sounds like what Bush demanded from Congress.

It's a bit worrying, because the UK GDP is around £1.5 trillion - of which only about £750 billion can be taxable realistically.

Leaves £250 billion for schools, hospitals, military defence etc.

That's before the price goes up...

LOL - that was great :)

Brilliant.

They're all around you mate. Just have a look. That is what you meant, isn't it? Just another massive transfer of money from your pocket to the gubment to the already wealthy. I read something the other day that the merkins have 335 billionaires in new yawk city already. Just look at the frikkin' banks over there getting 2% money from the fed and won't lend any of it out; even at their normal outrageous compound interest rates. And we're paying for this why?

What ever happened to personal responibility, fiduciary trust, and all that? did someone suspend all the laws of morality?

burn the witches - burn them all

I've started re-reading Galbraith's book on the 1929 crash. Then, as now, the banks fell over themselves to lend money to people who had no way of paying it back. Governments and the business community propped up the system for as long as they could, to preserve the illusion of prosperity, but in the end the collapse overwhelmed them. The controls that were put in place to prevent this happening again were swept away by the Thatcher/Reagan monetarist alliance of the 1980s and the only thing that is surprising is that it took so long. Giving money to the banks now to continue the insanity will only postpone the inevitable.

........Now in colour.