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It could be the first sign of the credit crunch reaching into the otherwise insulated retail banking/security markets. Will other banks cut back in the same way, I wonder?

You have to go back to 1994 when Reuters acquired market data outfit Quotron from Citi for $12.8 million. Mind you, Citi itself had paid $630 million for it eight years earlier. The bank also sold on its Merchant Services Unit to First Data in 2004, for an undisclosed sum.

The Church of England issued a press release in early October saying it had received more than 8000 hits on a prayer asking God for help with the current financial crisis, pushing up traffic on the site by more than a third since September. This was a week or so after the Archbishop of Canterbury did a Jesus in the temple and railed against short sellers and other financial market spivs for dragging down the economy. Shame about the use of Church investment vehicles in similar stock market raids.

As noted in this post back in May, the offshore call centre does serve one useful purpose - to frustrate awkward customers.

Why not? The French have already renationalised British Energy for us, courtesy of state-owned EDF.

Maybe the physicists at Cern were forced to switch off their Large Hadron Collider last week not because of a helium leak, but because of the sudden appearance of a black hole over Wall Street. This would explain the mysterious overnight disappearance of the entire investment banking sector and the imminent collapse of the entire banking system as other institutions are gradually sucked into the abyss.

Maybe we should update the card deck to more accurately reflect the modern financial system. So for instance:

Bank makes error in its favour, pay $200

Life insurance matures, pay $500 lost on original deposit

Bank forecloses on you loan, hand over keys to property

Everyone must donate 10% (to bail out Wall Street)

From sale of stock, you lose everything, go directly to jail

And the 'go directly to jail' card goes to....?

Hi Jay

Thanks for the feedback. If you've been following developments on Finextra over the past few months youi'll have noticed that we're undertaking a rolling programme of innovation across the site, including improved Community features. The most visible aspects of this work so far is reflected in a cleaner look and feel. Now that we're (reasonably) satisfied with the bodywork we're ready to lift up the hood and tinker around a little more with the engineering. You should see the first fruits of some of this work in the next month. It's a work in progress. So stay tuned.

Did you know that:

- A 1% increased adoption of e-invoicing in Europe can save 800,000 trees annually
- Sending 10,000 paper invoices per month releases 1 tonne of  CO2
- Switching to e-invoicing could save at least 2.8 million tonnes of CO2 worldwide annually