Sunday 8 February 2009

Financial advice

My bank is offering me advice on how to manage my business through the economic downturn. 

They recommend that I keep an eye on cashflow, deal with bad debts, concentrate on maintaining profit margins, and spread risk.

All very sound, but this advice is from an organisation that is being propped up with £20bn of our money, that is expected to announce losses that run into billions in the next few weeks, and that is reported to have set aside a £1bn fund to make bonus payments to staff.

At least they haven't lost their sense of humour.

3 comments:

Chris Hill said...

If you didn't routinly do these things your business wouldn't survive in normal times. I treat advice from banks like promises from politicians - rarely useful and usually too late. I ran a business for years which prospered in spite of having to deal with banks.

Fallibility said...

Echoing Chris' comments - I'm also getting emails from accountants (large enough firms to know better) offering the same sort of advice, and also offering all sorts of tax 'advice', most of which ought to get said accountants sued for thinking that a recession is the only time to think about the bleeding obvious and so on and so forth ...

Nick said...

Actually they're serious, God help them (or rather, us). They never HAD a sense of humour, or sense, come to that.