Mervyn’s magical money machine
ROBERT Chote, chief of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility, recently revealed his – and the Treasury’s – favoured means of estimating the chances of a Eurozone breakup: looking up the odds on William Hill (it’s a 1/5 shot against, by the way).
But there is another burning question on bankers’ lips: who is going to replace Bank of England governor Mervyn King when he steps down next year?
It turns out the book is open for bets on his replacement with rival bookies Paddy Power and following Chote’s advice we’ve checked out the odds. Favourites include famous regulators like Adair Turner (5/2) and Bank veteran Paul Tucker (5/2).
But The Capitalist’s favoured choice is Harry Potter star Warwick Davis who plays Professor Flitwick in the movies, a great bet at 500/1. After all, who better to continue the Bank’s flagship policy of conjuring money out of thin air?
Times are hard for investors struggling even just to hold on to their cash. But even so The Capitalist was surprised to see a particularly savvy and news-conscious scammer touting access to a £15m fund of the late Colonel Gaddafi’s money via an investment made with Fidelity in an account called SECRET CODE INVESTMENT. Nice try, but even FTSE 100 firms usually have better secret code names than that.