Bank

Every once in a while, says New York magazine, there appears a character who floats above “the wretched, amoral, meatheads” of Wall Street. Andrew J Hall is such a man.

Deposit rates in Hong Kong have fallen to a remarkable 0.01 per cent, and one bank has even brought it down to 0.001 per cent. This is really as close to zero as you can get. Frustrating, right?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aOQPmbrh1ZrA&refer=home

The French, known for their mistrust of banks, are not just stuffing money into mattresses in these anxious days of recession and minuscule interest rates. They are also putting their cash into cows.

For Pierre Marguerit, 60, cows make a safe, secure investment, allowing for long-term growth from a renewable resource. The cow contracts are hardly new, but go back to Richard the Lionheart; the French word for livestock, cheptel, is the root for "capital."

When I was a child growing up in England in the 1960s, my mother's dream for me was that I would become a bank clerk, with ambitions to be a bank manager, the epitome of all that was best in the world, safe, reliable, honest, looking after people's hard-earned savings, helping business and the world to grow. A bank manager could countersign your passport application, that's how trusted he was.