Monday, January 16, 2012

New Investment Opportunities

You, like me probably get a lot of junk mail sent to your place. There is one piece of mail coming around delivered by people in pinstriped suits that you may be interested in. It's to do with floating yourself on the stock market. Investment banks are currently bored with the existing set of assets they can invest in and want to invest in you. This means that they are interested in you paying them to make money out of you.

 

Sounds interesting?

 

Here's how it works. First, they take out options on aspects of your working day. Such as how long it takes you to get to work and how much you spend on food etc. And then they sell those options to other institutions at a marked up price and then they short those options and then hedge against your failing to keep your job and failing to get to work on time. Then they hire people to make sure there are enough hurdles in your way so that their simulations of your working day are correct (you may have noticed new hurdles and obstacles in the way of you getting anything useful done already).

 

Ideally you should be given the opportunity to invest in yourself (technically called self-investment or in-investment), but it's not cheap, buying shares in yourself means hiring a financial management person to tell you that shares in you will go up and down like a yo-yo for a hefty price. You will also need to pay for an financial auditor to come and check that you are not carrying out any insider trading and are completly ignorant of anything that can affect you.

Monday, January 02, 2012

New Year Resolutions

We have conversed with a team of economical and political scientists in order to extract a few salient markers for the coming year. They have worked hard and ignored all the present events and weather in order to come up with these predictions. Here they are (in reverse order):

1) France realise their president is a mushroom and resign en masse. During the year an enterprising investigative journalist pieces together several facts about the incumbent president: he seems to only be seen in dark damp places. He seems to be seen mainly at night. He has a mortal fear of steak and chips. Using a complex computer program and a bag of peanuts he concludes that the president is a mushroom and publishes the findings. France, who like to see their champignon in hors d'ouvres and not addressing the nation, are disgusted and refuse to get up in the morning.

2) Berlusconi returns. The special one realises that he performed miracles during his term as first minister of Italy and is identified as the reincarnation of Buddha by a complex computer simulation program. He takes up the mantle, replaces the pope as the grand father of the world and converts Italy and the world to Roman-Buddhism. His first task is to appoint all the weather girls in Italy as Roman-Buddhist high priests. RAI TV broadcasts his mantras 24hr daily.

3) Greece makes a massive financial turnaround as they find the entire debt behind the back of a sofa in the waiting room of the presidents palace after being guided there by his holiness Berlusconi.

4) Germany convinced of world-wide depression and gloom does what all good people do in times of crisis and bakes an enormous cake covering the entire country. It provides employment for the entire country during the baking process (which goes through many iterations until head chef Merkel is happy). The cake forms a protective layer over the country insulating it from the economic gloom. The head chef is hailed as a miracle worker and sent to the most dangerous parts of the world to see if she can work a miracle there.

5) The UK government solves the financial crisis by considering every person with any debt as a foreigner. The steps solve the financial, health and housing crisis simultaneously by classifying every single citizen as foreign apart from a refugee Swiss dictator.