Antilogisms

Years ago the witty chaps in The Times’ PHS column coined a new term, "antilogism", for a word or expression that means the opposite of what you’d expect. Not quite the same as an oxymoron, but more like a thumping great one or two word porky.

The term never caught on, and you won’t find it in the dictionary, but the financial crisis has brought the concept back out of the closet. We need that word again.

How else would you describe the following?

A security = something that is spectacularly insecure

Wealth management = the destruction of your savings

Investment management = the incompetent and spendthrift loss of your investment

Savings product = structured theft

Managed risk = unmanaged risk

Financial planning advice = guesswork on fees

Typical 10 year return = the same number with a negative sign in front of it

Personal pension provision = throwing your own savings away

Private sector occupational pension scheme = conspiring with your employer to throw your and their savings away

Defined benefit scheme = undefined benefit scheme

Public sector pensions provision = a charge on current tax payers, an increasing number of whom are private sector pensioners

Financial Service Authority = a body that isn’t an authority on either finance or service

Department of Work and Pensions = a group of civil servants overseeing the annihilation of both

Royal Bank of Scotland = an institution that is neither Royal nor Scottish

Bradford & Bingley = Whitehall & Madrid

Equitable Life = unfairness whichever way you look at it.

But the crisis is throwing up some terms that have a ring of truth: vulture funds do prey on the weak, and as more and more of our finance houses are nationalised the Bank of England is becoming exactly that.