I predict a world of trouble for Avis Europe, the car rental business, which has just cut perks available to members of the Avis Founders Club, shareholders who have been on board since the 1997 float. (The second one; I have a dim memory of the firm floating in the mid-1980s.) The Founders got a 50 per cent reduction on car rentals, but Alun Cathcart, the chairman, has just written to them reducing this to 20 per cent.

They are furious, and I would point out that when Eurotunnel did something similar recently, there was an awful fuss. Angry letters are already arriving at Cathcart's office. As one shareholder tells me, with the shares worth a few pence, “the cost of selling them would exceed the sale receipts for many people”. The only reason to hold them is the perks, and as Avis is “by no means the cheapest firm in the market”, a mere 20 per cent discount is hardly worth it.

This last point is disputed by the company. Avis has been clobbered by the internet, which makes it too easy to find a cheaper alternative, and hence the reduction in perks to the 20,000, at the last count, Founders. As I said, trouble ahead.

— Previous moves in interest rates, announced at noon, have seen responses from various interested parties pinging in within one or two minutes. “The National Association of Drain-Borers welcomes the Bank's decision to cut ...”. All clearly written beforehand, and in multiple versions to cover all eventualities. They have even, occasionally, given the game away by sending the wrong one.

Yesterday's 1.5 per cent cut was greeted with a stunned silence from the National Federation of etc, etc, who had plainly failed to anticipate the move. Hats off, then, to the Federation of Small Businesses, the first to weigh in at 12.15pmwith what was plainly a quickly rewritten response to the bigger than expected cut. And managed, implicitly, to take some of the credit for suggesting it.

Never seems to be room at the inn for Goldman

Are times hard for Goldman Sachs bankers? I only ask because a reader was in the Jumeirah Emirates Towers the other day - the huge, posh one, that is, built around twin towers. Three bankers were in the lift. One worked for Goldman and admitted that the bank never managed to book at the Emirates Towers but was forced to slum it at the Grand Hyatt instead. “The other two bankers sniggered slightly and said shame, as they always manage to stay at the Emirates hotel.”

— We last came across Albert Edwards, arch bear strategist at Société Générale, departing for his honeymoon and speculating whether the break would improve his mood. He is back, and it hasn't. His latest note talks of “the weight of the unfolding economic and market meltdown”, not as bad as the Great Depression but not much better. It puts him in mind of when he left university in 1981 and tried to get a job. He notched up about 60 rejections, including an especially humiliating one from the University of Hobart in Tasmania, not somewhere one would expect to be overwhelmed by offers from bright UK graduates. They thanked him for his application but were “sorry but some good candidates had applied”.

High-octane appointment

Shaun Lynn is to take over day-to-day running of BGC Partners, the interdealer broker, at the end of the year. Lynn, 44, is president of BGC and will step into the oversized shoes of Lee Amaitis, the famously foul-mouthed co-chief executive and hard man who rebuilt BGC after 658 staff were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.

The London-born Lynn, a fan of classic sports car racing, started as an equities dealer and joined Cantor Fitzgerald, from which BGC emerged in 2004, in 1989 as a bond broker, moving up to run the eurobond desk.

Interdealer brokers allow banks and other institutions to deal in bonds and other financial instruments. It is a specialist world, made up of a handful of firms, and renowned for a high-octane post-work lifestyle and endless legal actions over staff poaching. Amaitis will continue as vice-chairman in charge of acquisitions and hirings.

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