A friend’s 81-year-old father told me this weekend, “when the New York Times goes, I go.”

He was still kicking hard, but the same can’t be said for the Times this morning. Liquidity crunch?

The Hungarian forint is sliding fast, currently at 233, down from ~200 a month ago. 300 forints to the dollar seems like the right level.

Lucy Kellaway in the FT:

The day after I read about the begging woman I was sent something even more upsetting. A banker at Commerzbank e-mailed me to say that he and 499 other senior colleagues had just been summoned to the bank’s headquarters and told to write their ideas on A4 pieces of paper and stick them on the plastic branches of a tree.

In good times I used to delight in stories like these. Aren’t people silly, I used to think with a complacent air of superiority. But now my thinking is different: if banks’ response to the current crisis is to stick bits of paper on fake trees, then the only rational thing for the rest of us to do is to surrender ourselves to panic.