So God’s up in heaven and it’s just another boring day in paradise so he decides to pop down to purgatory and see what’s going on.

And when he gets there, there’s a big new enclosure marked “PPF ” so he pops inside and finds all these lugubrious souls walking around with big packs of debt on their backs.

“What’s going on?” says God to the first of the trustees

“I’m walking off my pension debt”

“How did you get into debt?” asks God

“It’s all the fault of the liabilities”, says the trustee “we had a brilliant investment strategy, beat the markets by 3% per year and then we got killed by some dodgy accounting standard“.

God’s not too impressed so he goes on to the next fellow.

“So what’s your problem?”

“It’s all down to our managers, they told us we could get 4% above the gilt yield by investing in Greek sovereign debt” replied the trustee

God goes up to a third trustee –  “so who are you blaming?”.

“Oh God” , he sighs – “we were a just a small scheme, we didn’t know what we were doing and when we did get a bit of advice we were too afraid to act on it”

“This is awful” thought God, “I’d better have a word with the bloke in charge“. Up sprang a Regulator – God could tell he was a Regulator as he had a smile on his face.

“What’s going on , Regulator?” asked God. “Haven’t we got any of this lot into paradise yet?”

“Fat chance” smiled the Regulator “these are the lucky ones, you should see what we’re up to in hell!”