I’m not sure when exactly, but at some moment between my chum Harry’s hedge fund collapsing and my pal Eddie setting up a $1 billion hedge fund in Zurich, the global financial industry resumed its swagger. Humility turned out to have the lifespan of a fruit fly with croup. The only thing that can prevent the world plunging into a new atomic age of arrogance may be a small Indonesian housemaid.
The lady in question is to be found looking miserable on a stool next to the ATM machine at the Taman Anggrek branch of Bank Danamon in Jakarta. To her employer, she is an impoverished serf, performing mind-numbing duties for a pittance. On Wall Street, she would have her own office, an obsequious intern and be described as the head of arbitrage sales trading.
Her “job” arises from a cynical calculation by the chap whose floors she normally mops. Bank Danamon has launched a national competition offering a new BlackBerry to the seven most active users of its ATM machines each week. What one shrewd fellow spotted is that, provided you command enough raw maid power to make the insane seem normal, you can win seven BlackBerries in as many days.
The bank, you see, waives ATM fees for anyone transferring funds from a rival bank into one of its account. And the minimum ATM transfer amount is 10,000 rupiah — about 63p.
The maid is picked up by car from her home in Kupang at 9am and driven to an ATM where she is armed with a chair, a bottle of water, a lunchbox and the cash cards of her boss’s Danamon and Citibank accounts. In the course of a nine-hour session, she can make 1,000 transfers of 10,000 rupiah before a second maid is shipped in to relieve her and take over the night shift. In a country where labour costs are derisory, the rewards are considerable: BlackBerrys are unsubsidised by mobile phone companies and each one will fetch about £340 in cash. The cost of employing a platoon of maids to punch in the transactions relentlessly is a tiny fraction of that, and the originator of the scam has netted £10,000 worth of BlackBerrys in a few short weeks. The maid is kept going by the belief that her boss will “see her right” financially.
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To summarise the maid’s work, then: she gets up early, arrives at a bank and spends nine stultifying hours at a computer screen exploiting a gap in the market by moving someone else’s money from one place to another, motivated at all times by the mythical promise of a year-end bonus.
I ask Chris, a big-shot City currency trader, if there is any difference between him and the maid. He says he probably has nicer cufflinks.
Death by celluloid
Killer capitalism, obliquely, is the pantomime villain of a new film produced on the orders of the Tokyo driving licence centre — a chamber of horrors where limping, superannuated police officers permanently chide anyone below the age of 70 for having fun at the wheel. Under Japan’s draconian rules, drivers have to renew their licences every couple of years — a process involving a 90-minute drear-fest as motorists are informed of changes to the law since their licences were first issued.
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That part, unfortunately, takes only 15 minutes, leaving the authorities with the task of filling the remaining time with something constructive. Greek tragedians would be proud of the outcome. I have seen some miserable films, but It Happened that Night deserves a Palme D’Or for the most uncompromising portrait of despair ever committed to celluloid. The folk-song narration leaves the viewer wondering if humanity will ever be capable of love again.
The film is a worthy parable of the dangers of drinking and driving. Initially we see a ruddy-cheeked bounder — a baker or something — leaving for work with a cheery farewell to his gorgeous wife and scamp of a son. In contrast with every Japanese father I have ever met, he is neither disengaged, suicidal nor brimming with vague hatred of everything. Happiness dooms him.
Cut to his nemesis: a simple salaryman forced to work punishing hours to satisfy the Dickensian baron in charge of some pointless factory. Of course, we all know it was the booze that caused the accident, runs the clear undertone, but it was damn dirty capitalism that drove Mr Tanaka to the bottle. At the end of his tether, the worker bee has a drink or two, drives home and crushes the jolly fat man to death. Prison fatigues and thousand-yard stares through prison bars follow.
Then the real trouble starts. Over the next hour we see the disastrous ripples of the accident. The bereaved wife is thrust immediately into the worst economic calamity imaginable and forced to take a job scrubbing toilets. Her scampy son becomes a nihilist and runs away. Members of the killer’s family each rumble down a dismal path to catastrophe. The folk singer plays us out with a ditty that sucks all joy from the world, as the audience ponders why the Japan described in the film lacks any social safety nets to save just one of these poor people from oblivion.
Oh, and check your brake lights chirps the ex-copper as we file out, numbed.