If you had 7 billion dollars...

[krissel]

...what would you buy?


Prompted by that French banker who lost at least that amount...

http://www.moneyrelations.com/2008/01/28/i...dollars-id-buy/

[Gregg]

Well of course, the 17 million Apple iPhones!

Or, like that razor guy, I'd buy the company.

Really, I'd like to buy a company I used to work for, and make the current owner sweat a little.

[beacher]

A really, Really, REALLY good lawyer. . .

[Highmac]

This one's going the rounds over here (and probably all over Europe):

QUOTE

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissants.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike. But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier. At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he had been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy & arrogant.

Maybe about one-seventh of Yahoo...

[Xairbusdriver]

Well, there goes the price of "´" marks through the roof!

[Gregg]

Well, they arent going to get anything outa me. Ill just stop using the little buggers. You cant let the evil empire strike with impunity. Its just not right. Thatll show em! :hummph:

[Xairbusdriver]

You can still get single, closing quotation marks at a great price! Thanks to the current slew of political remarks and responses and the he said, she said. The newly expensive mark is the "diacritic(al)" mark. Specifically an "acute ascent." As seen on the list on the right-hand edge of this <Wiki page>. I'm most familiar with their use on é, ó and á. Usually a vowel, typed on a Mac with a option-e and then the plain e, o, a, etc. letter. Three key presses for a single letter. Not very efficient and also part of the price increase, I suspect! Seems like some kind of cónspíráy, if you ásk mé! :paranois: