Who's laughing now?

In times like this when cash is king, the only thing that is stopping me from keeping money under my mattress are two dogs who would probably find it and chew it all up.

So I did the next best thing. I put the money that I had taken out of a foreign bank and put it in a local bank that's noted for its ringfenced conservatism and low leverage, in a plain vanilla fixed deposit.

Normally, when you try and open a fixed deposit there, some financial advisor tries to sell you an investment product. This time round, they didn't even try. I guess they knew nobody would buy. And the most amazing thing wasn't even that, it was that I had to wait 2 hours to open a FD account. You used to be served straightaway or maybe wait just 10 minutes or so.

There's that many people throwing money at Big Local Bank.

One of the professors at the NUS Business School has been giving a series of lectures to my organisation. He said that in his opinion, Asian banks aren't as severely affected as US banks by the subprime contagion because they were unexposed to sophisticated products. Basically, their ignorance saved them, he said.

And now, these dumb local banks are laughing all the way to the err, bank.