A date for your diary? Monday 24 February.

I will be giving a talk for the Economic Research Council (ERC) on Monday 24 February.

The talk will be called “THE GREAT SAVINGS AND PENSIONS SCANDAL…and how to protect your money”. In the talk I will expose how the sales messages and methods used by financial services insiders to get us to put our money into things like banks, shares, unit trusts, pensions, annuities and equity release schemes are almost always misleading and usually based on blatant lies.

The talk will be at the ROYAL OVERSEAS LEAGUE, Park Place, St. James’s Street, London, SW1A 1LR. This is a beautiful old building just off Piccadilly, behind the Ritz and overlooking Green Park.

There are drinks and networking from 18.30h to 19.00h. The talk is from 19.00h to 19.30h and then there’s a Q&A from 19.30h to 20.00h.

If you’re in the London area on 24 February do come along. I don’t get paid (in fact I’ll have to pay my own travel expenses). Tickets cost about £15 and all the money goes to running the ERC. Next week, I’ll post details of where people can buy tickets.

I’ll be travelling and then in meetings over the next few days so will not be doing any new posts till Monday 27 January.

As for Global Warming. I don’t know what the weather’s like in the UK, but here in the Land of Smells it’s freezing compared to what it should be. Every morning now I see the Germans who live in this building all troop down to the swimming pool – eins zwei, eins zwei, eins zwei. Then, being terribly organised, they all take out special floating thermometers which they put in the water. After a minute or so, they take their thermometers out, look at them, shake their heads in disgust, grunt and then march back up to their flats – eins zwei, eins zwei, eins zwei. It’s quite funny to watch.