{"id":693,"date":"2012-11-25T11:04:39","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T22:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=693"},"modified":"2012-11-25T11:04:39","modified_gmt":"2012-11-24T22:04:39","slug":"if-this-is-right-then-its-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=693","title":{"rendered":"If this is right, then it\u2019s wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>According to a recent news report, the owners and managers of a number of businesses have been having difficulty understanding the credit agreements they have entered into with their bank.\u00a0 Their lawyers and accountants have also found the agreements difficult (or impossible) to understand.<\/p>\n

Apparently, one of the business owners approached his local bank manager and asked for a plain English explanation.\u00a0 The bank manager was unable to provide one.\u00a0 It seems that he didn\u2019t know what the agreement said either.\u00a0 But he did offer to get \u2018an expert from head office\u2019 to make a presentation.<\/p>\n

The expert duly arrived and dazzled the business owner with his graphs and tables and scenarios, but, at the end of it all, the business owner was none the wiser.<\/p>\n

Time was of the essence, and so, still not quite sure to what he was agreeing, the business owner signed the document.\u00a0 Unwise?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 But if you can\u2019t trust your bank manager, who can you trust?<\/p>\n

But then, a few months on, it became evident that the deal to which the business owner had agreed \u2013 the deal which he hadn\u2019t really understood \u2013 was not at all what he needed.\u00a0 However, when he tried to get out of the agreement, he found that he could only do so by paying a substantial break fee.<\/p>\n

According to the news report, the break fee was in the region of $4 million.\u00a0 And notification of this was buried right there in the small print of the agreement that hardly anyone had been able to understand.<\/p>\n

Many legally-binding agreements are both complicated and clunky.\u00a0 But they don\u2019t need to be.<\/p>\n

I will be the first to acknowledge that news reports are sometimes wrong and often exaggerated.\u00a0 But even if this one is half right, the bank has, intentionally or unintentionally, made a real hash of things.\u00a0 There is no (good) reason to have an agreement that cannot be easily understood by both parties.\u00a0 As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said:<\/p>\n

\u2018Anything and everything that can be said, can be said clearly.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent news report, the owners and managers of a number of businesses have been having difficulty understanding the credit agreements they have entered into with their bank.\u00a0 Their lawyers and accountants have also found the agreements difficult … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":694,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}