BySimon Kuper
Published: December 4 2010 01:12 | Last updated: December 4 2010
In summer 2008 we found an apartment in Paris. But getting a mortgage was tricky. French banks wanted proof that we’d be able to keep paying no matter what. We showed them some shares. Shares can fall, they scoffed. Then a bank sent me to a cardiologist. He turned me inside out, and was already ushering me wordlessly out of the door when I asked him what he’d found. “It’s OK,” he mumbled. He wasn’t working for me. He was working for the bank, which wanted to know whether I might live long enough to pay off a 25-year mortgage. Read more...