By golly, I've got to start using Firefox more. Opera gives me the breakfast but won't give me his bank account number, so I can't transfer it to my own offshore account.
Don't bother, Eric, they aren't paying any more interest either. In the 80s, you could get over 15% tax-free (to be paid to your local country of residence by your own good declarations... Was a time you could live like a sort of minor royal (very very minor) off interest alone.
Something I've never understood about money: there is supposed to have been a crash, and much of it has suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth. So, with the deepest respect, where the hell did it go? Nobody I heard of lit a bonfire with it. It must still be sitting around in bank accounts gathering zero interest. The guy who sold the house to the guy who couldn't really afford it still got the money, and his bank is holding onto that for him or it is sitting in another house; the bank that lent the money still has the house it financed and the value of that will either (apparently) grow or diminish as the market seems to think its value might be
at any given moment and it isn't an absolute. So, why is the panic so severe? Confidence, confidence and confidence: the only three reasons anyone undertakes any business venture.
I suspect that the truth is that nobody really understands money, that its original purpose as a form of common exchange has been lost in the mists of time, that it has become such a complex and convoluted concept that it is thought to be open to all manner of transactions, dreams and gambles that it could never hope to cope with as the basic exchange mechanism that it used to be and probably, in its own mind, still is. Prendergast doesn't think much of it: I never trusted the mother - are you surprised?
;-(
Rob C