African Bank has reconfirmed my suspicions that the best business to be involved with is banking.  After all, once you obtained a licence from the government to run a bank, there is very little that can go wrong for you.  If you are cautious and manage your bank carefully, you will make decent money over the years or alternatively, you can borrow money from your investors, lend out millions to people who do not secure it in any way – with a car or a house – and hope that they pay you back later.  If they don’t pay you back, that will not really be a problem but more of that later.  In the meantime, on the basis of all the loans you are making to everybody you can project your future profits and you can pay yourself healthy bonuses, huge salaries and give yourself share options so as to buy your shares more cheaply and make money on the market as well.  

If the worst comes to the worst, and all of those bad loans come back to hurt the business, if you have advanced money to enough people, the government, and this is true of governments all around the world, will have to step in to save your bank, rather than risk further damage.  You will not have to return any of the bonuses or huge salaries you have paid yourself while running the business into the ground and as one executive told the Sunday Times recently, “f*** the poor”.  He left out in this particular case that it was actually “f*** the public” because the R50 million in bonuses that he received, while running what was clearly a very bad business, will never have to be repaid by him – because of course that is just business – and we as taxpayers will pay it.  It seems that there are a very few businesses, like law, where you actually have to take personal responsibility for your mess-ups and in many Stock Exchange listed companies, those who make the poor decisions that lead to so many people losing so much money, never ever pay a price.