An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently.
If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left.
With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000.
With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left.
But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have $214 cash.
Even better, if a year ago you had decided to entrust your $1,000 to the needy rather than the greedy, you would have ended up today with $1,000.
This market-beating 0 per cent rate of return is available through a website called www.kiva.org. It’s a site dedicated not to charitable giving but to charitable lending — and to the refreshingly entrepreneurial idea that if you want to feed a man, the best thing isn’t to give him a fish, or even to teach him to fish, but to lend him the money to buy a net.
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