A startling e-mail is doing the rounds about a fire drill in Singapore. The alarm went off at 4pm and employees duly filed out. No sign of a fire, but they waited for ten minutes anyway.

Then a manager made an announcement: “Dear employees, with melting heart I am making this announcement that for many of you this will be your last fire evacuation drill.” Because of the recession, almost half the staff were being laid off. Those who were going would find, on trying to reenter the building, that their swipe passes would not work. The layoffs were being done this way to avoid “any violent outbursts inside the office”.

True, or another urban myth? Well, half and half. In one version, the employer is identified as a Japanese car company. In another, it could be anywhere. The excellent Snopes.com website, which investigates such tales, found that though the story has only just arrived on the internet, a version dates back to a Houston oil company in 1994, significantly, in the middle of the last recession. And something similar has happened on at least two other occasions. Rest in peace, they have abolished inheritance tax

An odd fact from a debate about the bonus culture hosted by Julia Hobsbawm’s Editorial Intelligence and Cass Business school. Economist Tim Harford warned the audience not to underestimate how financial incentives distort our behaviour. He cited the record of births and deaths in Australia. As a date for the abolition of inheritance tax came nearer, the death rate fell. It rose again once death was tax-free. At least, that was what the death certificates claimed. And a baby bonus distorted the birth rate. “Whether we’re entering the world, or leaving it, we respond to incentives,” he said, “so we have to be very careful about what sort of behaviour these bonuses reward.”

Times are hard and, as Bank of America tells me, “we’re looking across the bank at different ways of saving money”. So at the bank’s offices in South London they have dispensed with the company that waters the potted plants. Instead, the plants are being shifted out of meeting rooms on to floor areas and staff are urged to “Adopt-A-Plant” and look after them. They’ll die, I say. “I don’t think they will. In Canary Wharf a lot of people have their own plants on their desks and they survive.” At the bank’s Wharf offices, it seems, all plants are staff-owned and “we don’t have corporate plants”. What’s a corporate plant? One has a vision of something with dull grey foliage and a laminated tag on a ribbon round its trunk.

I have been thinking about Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is the hate figure in Orwell’s 1984 , a former member of the establishment who is singled out as the ultimate villain, pilloried in televised hate sessions designed to draw attention away from the failings of the authorities. It would, of course, never work in real life. We’d never be gullible enough to blame just one person for our troubles, so shifting the spotlight away from Government, all the other greedy bankers, regulators . . . Would we?

Dismantling the barriers
In the blue corner: Larry Summers

Who said, of what, and when: “Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

It was Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary, it was 1999, and the occasion was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. I am indebted to the satirical website SlackBelly for pointing it out. The Act had separated bankers from brokers, and its repeal allowed the excesses that have brought the financial system to the state it is in today.

Oddly enough, at the time, some foolish dissenters suggested the repeal would “someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system”. Summers, a few months ago, slunk away into obscurity . . . er, oh, no, he didn’t. He’s been appointed director of the National Economic Council by President Obama.

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