Financial jokes that were once mainly the province of pointy-headed economists are flourishing as a popular genre, thanks to the recession and an intense longing for a national catharsis to deal with everyone's miserable personal finances.
Meanwhile, his comrades in top-secret outfit the IMF – the franchise has, incidentally, never to my knowledge done financial jokes – remain at ground level: tough, stolid Brandt (Jeremy Renner), super-cool Luther (Ving Rhames) and wacky Benji (Simon Pegg), the colleague with whom Ethan is very much bezzies.
One Mumbai financial bigwig jokes that two licences will be granted one, by the RBI, on the basis of competence, and the other by politicians in Delhi on the basis of bribe size.
He also fired executives whom he had recently promoted and had put into Merrill's special bonus program (one financial adviser joked that it might be more dangerous to be Mr. O'Neal's friend than his enemy).
Over a recent breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria a few days before the annual Nascar awards banquet, Susan Schandel, her chief financial officer, joked that running into Mrs. Kennedy in the lobby could mean another chore rather than being able to go shopping.
What a joke: financial counseling, being there before someone defaults... How about 8.5 percent interest on all loans, no competition.
That has hurt ordinary people around the globe, who think that "to put is a verb, rather than a financial security", Summers jokes grimly.
Back in the early stages of the financial crisis, wags joked that our trade with China had turned out to be fair and balanced after all: They sold us poison toys and tainted seafood; we sold them fraudulent securities.
The financial crash was a joke to them.
