Investment advice

NatWest, part of Royal Bank of Scotland, is running ads at the moment for a new free personal financial review, which - amongst other things - 'will check you are getting the best possible returns from your savings and investments'. Someone in the bank has a sense of humour (or bare-faced cheek) - RBS is now mainly owned by the state, precisely because it wasn't very good at spotting dodgy investments.

Would you take advice from an organization that has had to accept a 20 billion pound bailout, and that has now admitted that it has lost up to 400 million pounds which it placed with (the aptly named) Madoff?

On the receiving end of poor design

Having cancelled my Sky subscription, I waited for the final payment to be taken, and then stopped the direct debit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I then received a demand this morning that I reinstate the direct debit, with the threat that I would be charged administration fees for any payments made by invoice. On contacting Sky, at my expense, I was told that this was just an automated response, as their accounting system doesn't check the account status before mailing out threats to (ex-)customers.

Perhaps not quite as bad as one financial institution where I worked for a bit, where payment requests were regularly sent out to customers who had died, even though the customer status was known to the system. Even some of the staff there found this a bit insensitive...

Banks

Another spectacular financial scandal - according to the BBC, Madoff appears to have been shopped by his own sons, so I don't suppose Christmas will be that joyful in the Madoff household this year.

I particularly liked the words of another hedge fund boss, who said, "It appears that at least $15bn of wealth, much of which was concentrated in southern Florida and New York City, has gone to money heaven." His Ponzi scheme isn't original, but the scale of it is (many more billions than 15 have gone missing).

It would be funny to see that so many banks were completely taken in by the scam, if it wasn't for the fact that it's inevitably the customers - and, in the case of RBS, the tax-payers - who will end up paying for it. By chance, Niall Ferguson's Channel 4 series, The Ascent of Money, covered this very scheme last week. The programme, which is well-worth watching, points out that to understand today's financial mess, you have to know a bit about the history - shame the banks weren't watching.