Christmas Crunch levity

I received a few nice, light thoughts over the Christmas period.  One was an email that told the story of the monkey buying man ...

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each.

This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms.

The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each but had to go to the city on some business so his assistant would buy on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again ... only lots and lots of monkeys!

That kind of links up with my earlier stories of credit crunch humour.

I was particularly pleased to also see some great satirist cartoons in the American media over Christmas.  This one is from Chan Lowe in the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

whilst another from Ken Catalino made me laugh:

and there's still plenty of jokes floating around the internet, such as these ones:

Yesterday, we sat with down our son and told him that it wasn't going to be a good
Christmas. He said, "Is it because of the credit crunch?" and we told him,
"No, it's because we don't like you."

What happens if you go bust, and your bank also goes bust, the car industry goes bust, and the Government goes
bust? Nothing, except that you still go bust. 

The Dow Jones is so ugly right now that they are thinking about renaming it "the Vinnie Jones".

Yep, there's plenty of humour out there although few hit the mark as hard as German Magazine Titanic!, which has this front page for January 2009:

Roughly translated, so meistern wir die krise: alles liquidieren! means "how do we cope with this crisis: put everything into liquidation!"

Yep.  Liquidity will be key in 2009 ... but not sure we want it that way!