Scaring your clients may not be the best way to drum up new business, but that didn't stop Credit Suisse trying to strike terror into the hearts and minds of attendees on the opening day of its 2009 Asian investment conference.
In a telling sign of the times, the Swiss bank opted to entertain its clients yesterday evening not with a lavish cocktail party or expensive celebrity singers but with a screening of the 2008 financial horror film I.O.U.S.A.
If you've never heard of this chilling documentary, it's hardly surprising. Although it was billed as doing for the US economy what Al Gore's 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth did for environmental awareness, the film faces a severe uphill struggle. The American people just don't want to know the bad news.
This soon becomes all too apparent. The film focuses on a campaign called The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, in which former head of the US Government Accountability Office David Walker and other activists take an extended road trip across America in a Paul Revere-like attempt to alert the public to the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility.
The difficulty of their mission is illustrated - hilariously at times - by the film's vox pop interviews with ordinary Americans. Invariably, questions such as 'How big is the government's budget deficit?' or 'What is a trade deficit?' are met either with blank stares or wildly inaccurate replies like 'A couple of million?' or 'Is that when you borrow more than you spend?'.
It's not only the public who don't care. When the road show reaches New Hampshire, a report on ballooning US national debt levels by a diligent local television reporter is dropped from the evening news in favour of a story about a jewel thief who swallowed a stolen diamond ring in a bid to evade arrest.
Even sadder are the attempts by members of the Concerned Youth of America movement to spread their message on campus by handing out leaflets warning of the threat posed by the swelling US budget deficit. Their efforts are studiously ignored, and the remark by one campaigner that they are getting a good response appears not so much optimistic as desperately deluded.