Love or loathe April Fools’ Day, for many journalists, financial institutions and anonymous tricksters, it has afforded the perfect excuse to carry out bold and controversial financial pranks through the ages.
Here are just a few of the hoaxes that have gone down in financial history.
Tricksy taxes To Hawaii first, and the year is 1954. Disc jockey Hal Lewis, also known as J. Aukhead Pupule – Polynesian for ‘Crazy Fishhead’ – announced live on air that the Hawaiian Senate was revoking all income tax paid in the year before and offering taxpayers refunds.
The April Fools’ Day prank was not entirely implausible. Joseph Farringdon, a Hawaii Congressman, had only recently demanded that Hawaiians be given a refund of all the US federal taxes they had ever paid if Hawaii was not officially deemed a state, which it was not until 1959.
Naturally, the Internal Revenue Bureau was inundated with refund applications and several banks were flooded with requests to place stock and bond orders with the public’s upcoming refunds.
One Californian newspaper, the
Lodi-News Sentinel, sensationally reported at the time that the trickster DJ had left Hawaii “agog” and caused the “greatest commotion since the Pearl Harbour attack”, which had taken place 13 years before.
Later that day, amid the unfolding uproar, Lewis was ‘fired’ from his post, again live on air, by his general manager. But it transpired that this too had been a hoax when the dismissal prompted listeners to phone in and ask that the manager take pity on the much-loved Lewis. The ‘general manager’ was in fact Lewis’s PR agent.
Internal Revenue Collector Stanley V McKenney was less than impressed. The
Sentinel reported that he had requested his office to be “left out” of future pranks, explaining that his employees were “busy enough” handling legitimate 1953 tax returns. They certainly did not need a flood of 1953 tax refund applications.
You can read the original Lodi-News Sentinel report from 2 April, 1954 here
High-finance hijinksPublished just in time for April Fools’ Day 1982, the respected
Wall Street Journal took on a new moniker,
Off the Wall Street Journal.
The facsimile publication was the mischievous brainchild of Briton Tony Hindra, an old classmate of Stephen Hawking who had previously been behind
The National Lampoon. It contained no less than 24 pages of completely fake news.
Some highlights included President Reagan’s ‘announcement’ of a new national maximum wage of $5 an hour for all employees below the level of vice-president, and the ‘news’ that Fortune 500 companies could now depend on a generous $450bn in handouts per year.
The ‘Your money mattress’ feature cheerfully told readers how they could guarantee $20m at retirement by putting aside just $46,332 each year. Despite this being many people’s entire salary, it quipped that this was no matter, as it was “tax-deferred”.
The publication ended with the following, rather insulting, ‘note from your sponsors’: “If you are reading this, the joke is on you ... If you don’t know who we are we don’t want to know you.”
You can see a report on the fake journal here
Suspicious accountsFast forward a decade to 1992 when
The Telegraph reported that a new risk-free savings account was to be introduced in the UK. Its name, Zebra, stood for ‘zero effort best rate account’. Dubious sounding to say the least, Zebras would accrue income tax annually, rather than at final maturity, and promised to “always pay the highest rate of interest on the market”.
The accounts further guaranteed “absolutely no risk to the underlying capital”.
Zebras were to be managed by an organisation named Lirpa UK, a subsidiary of a mysterious Hungarian investment bank named Lirpa Loof.
But how would Zebras manage to deliver on all of this risk-free investment opportunity? Through a “complicated mix of investment vehicles, including futures, options, swaps and pixies”, said
The Telegraph.
The mention of pixies gave the game away to many, but some skim-reading financial advisers were bowled over by the incredibly appealing new scheme and contacted the paper to request further details.
The Telegraph responded publicly by pointing out that ‘Lirpa Loof’ spelled backwards is ‘Fool April’.
You can read The Telegraph writer’s account of what happened after she published the hoax here (scroll down)
It’s too early to say what this year’s 1 April will have in store, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for pixie investment vehicles.
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