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Jazz at the bank

Saturday, 18 October 2008

About twenty years ago my love and I made more money than we spent. My father, who worked for an assurance company, advised me to buy “pensioenpolissen”. He told me that the few thousand guilders, that we lend the bank for several years in a row, would grow into a “pensioen”, for the time I was too old to earn a living. I didn’t think much about my future, I expected to be a comic letter for the rest of my life back then. Ha!
This was in the late eighties. Every now and then I thought about the money that we would get one day. My idea was to start a publishing company, to publish all th books that i liked, without having to care to much about profits. The first payment of these “pensioenpolissen” will be within a few years. Nice dreams!
Recently it turned out that the banks and assurance companies have been lying about these “pensioenpolissen”, and about many other things. The situation is not yet clear, but it is very unlikely that we get more money back that we lend to the bank 20 years ago. We don’t need that money, we can probably get a long without it, but the idea that we, as a society, are making such a mess of what could be a paradise for all of us, is hard to accept.
Here are two advertisement records that Dutch banks made in the sixties:

There are more banks that made advertisement records, but there is one song on one of this records that I want to share with you today. It is not really a song, but an attempt to get young people to work for these banks. I think it is great humour.

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