Fortunately for me, I'm in a position (so far) to be self-righteous and judgemental about all the financial doom and gloom being peddled by everything from the Times to the free Metro paper on the morning tube. Sure, lawyers are starting to be made redundant in London, but there's not the constant likelihood of my firm actually ceasing to exist overnight which would plague me if I worked in a bank or as a trader. The risk of me ever becoming one of those things is also ridiculously low. Sometimes I fail to understand how I even ended up as a lawyer, given the amount of space in my head that's devoted to trivia on 1990s American television rather than what constitutes a binding contract or how the court system is structured.
Anyway,
for no particular good reason - just a hunch, and a favourable Australian dollar conversion at the time* - we closed our savings account with the English arm of Icelandic bank Landsbanki a few weeks ago. Today the news broke that all the Icelandic government has had to take over Landsbanki (see the
Guardian article). There's not really any concrete word on when account holders will be able to access their money, although I think a certain amount of loss is guaranteed between the UK and Icelandic governments. Once you've gone through probably frustrating and lengthy compensation application processes. So as I said, we closed our account before all this happened, which is excellent and also lucky for us. I feel sorry for the Icelanders though. Although at least they live in a fantastic country. Perhaps that softens the blow a bit? Perhaps not.
I've tried to get by being deliberately oblivious to how markets work in terms of my personal finances but maybe I will have to start paying attention now.
*I'm now told we did it for a very good reason, which is that The Boyfriend
knew this was about to happen. I'm glad someone did.
1 comment:
That is weird huh? Knowing to pull out of that bank...
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