Let me tell you a hilarious joke

Let me tell you a hilarious joke. The other day, I saw an incontinent old woman in a supermarket, and she pissed herself OK, here’s another. Trains that are five minutes late are “deemed” to be on time, to fiddle rail statistics. When South Africa’s apartheid laws worked against the interests of the state, particular black people could be “deemed” to be white. These days, hospital chairs can be “deemed” to be beds, for the purpose of fiddling hospital statistics. Whenever politicians use the word “deemed” they’re up to mischief. Gather round, semantic fans Or fans of semantics as we semanticists prefer to say Let us begin with “deemed” Try this out as a principle.

In other words, just the kind of thing that happens after someone has told you that you have overtaken New York as the world’s number one deal-centre.. Historically, with an empire at our beck and call and with less need than many of our competitors to reach out to new markets, for example to learn their languages, we have not always been especially good marketers.Falls from grace are generally preceded by a period of self-satisfaction, a blindness to gathering realities, a decreasingly justified self-belief. It may be harder to develop new ones, especially in fields that cut across some of our traditional, not always helpful attitudes and assumptions. How long, I wonder, will it be before a Chinese bank buys a western investment bank? With both Bank of China and ICBC planning to float internationally next year, and thereby placing themselves among the world’s biggest banks, the answer to the question is – probably quite soon.To stay ahead we must build upon all of our existing advantages. If – or rather when – they succeed, it could have the same dramatic effect on our economy as the Japanese had on manufacturing in the 1960s and 70s.

To keep its position, it may well be that London will have much more actively to market itself, both individually by the many outstanding professional services firms here, and collectively as “the City”.
Economies like India’s are gearing up to become major exporters of services. If another global financial centre is developed, it will probably be in Shanghai. There is no shortage of major cities which will continue to seek to challenge London’s supremacy. A recent survey shows London is now ahead of New York as the world’s top location for global financial transactions.Most of you know the reasons – the language, the breadth and depth of skills and experience, the time zone, the relatively benign regulatory environment, the hard-work culture, and (you would expect me to say this given my involvement and interest in every aspect of the development of London’s Docklands) the infrastructure.

That is why I was convinced that he would not stay for much longer in his Likud party, and allow Benjamin Netanyahu and the other right-wing rejectionists to paralyse him forever.. In 1948, when he was left wounded in the battlefield of Latroun, Sharon vowed never again to remain helpless. His motto has always been to gain the initiative and shock the adversary. Although everybody was talking about this move for months, when it happened, a shockwave rocked the country. I was one of those who believed that Sharon was about to go his own way, as a close look at the pattern of his behaviour over almost six decades gives more than a clue.