Philippa Yelland

Fat cats on a hot tin roof

BRICK: Have you ever heard the word 'mendacity'?
BIG DADDY: Sure. Mendacity is one of them five-dollar words that cheap politicians throw back and forth at each other.
BRICK: You know what it means?
BIG DADDY: Don't it mean lying and liars?
BRICK: Yes, sir, lying and liars.
BIG DADDY: What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it ... Think of all the lies I got to put up with! Pretences! Ain't that mendacity? 
- Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams, 1954
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Gériatriques Sans Frontières

We're self-deluding old fossils traipsing about on some gap year. We're all past it . all we can afford is some beige bloody bungalow with a sodding panic button in the sodding corner.

- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

When the wicked carried us away in captivity

By the rivers of Babylon
We sat down and wept
- Psalm 137

While I re-read ASIC's shadow shopping report on retirement advice, I almost sat down and cried - for clients being ill-advised, for advisers in their self-delusion, for the general media's parroting of the assurances by advice peak bodies that education was the remedy.
Perhaps the most alarming finding was the yawning chasm between the technical quality of the advice (as assessed by ASIC analysts) and the customers' own assessment of that advice: 86 per cent of customers felt they had received good-quality advice, in contrast to ASIC's assessment that barely 3 per cent of the advice was good quality. Of the rest, 58 per cent was adequate, and 39 per cent poor.

'Ave a go, ya mugs

Anyways, there I was last weekend drivin' down Hunter Street, the main drag in Newcastle, drivin' in me hot FJ Holden with chrome-plated grease nipples and twin overhead foxtails and I was rememberin' Bob Hudson, and anyways there was this mob of blokes standing outside the Parthenon Milk Bar, and outside the Parthenon was this beautiful-lookin' sheila on a ladder and over the 'milk bar' part of the sign she was hangin' another sign and on the sign was the words 'Wealth Planners', and suddenly I was rememberin' when I was a very, very, very young sheila in 1975 and Bob was strummin' his guitar and drawlin' ...   ... read more »

There's no business like (risky) show business

 "What we're concerned about is risk management. So, when we see remuneration policies that encourage risky behaviour - yes, we get very interested."

- David Lewis, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority general manager, March 2012

The man your man could be rich like

SCENE: Offices of US ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.
Writer-producers Craig Allen and Eric Kallman are Skyping with client Australian Monetary Consultants (AMC).
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Duped by the same old new clothes

Once upon a time, there was an emperor who was so obsessed with new clothes that he proclaimed he wanted to invest his money in a wardrobe of highly structured coats, which were so complex his ordinary tailors who advised him could not understand them.
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Plagued by investment locusts

 I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten -

the great locust and the young locust,

the other locusts and the locust swarm.
 - Joel 2.25

Sex 'n' drugs 'n' stock 'n' roll

Turmoil and uncharted waters are the new business-as-usual. Turning uncertainty into opportunities means doing business differently.
- Connie Comber, ReImagine Business managing director
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JUST ANOTHER M&ANIC MONDAY

It's just another manic Monday

I wish it was Sunday

'Cause that's my funday

My 'I don't have to runday'

It's just another manic Monday

- "Manic Monday", The Bangles

• Profiting from the undead
• Gnomes of Townsville storm in