“May your thoughts be as deep as your pockets,” a Citibank advertisement suggests. Oh yeah, that would fix me right up. Maybe my thoughts should have holes in them too, to complete the analogy. I don’t know if this is a national campaign, but Manhattan, at least, is full of Citi ads with seriously annoying fortune-cookie advice like “He who dies with the most toys is dead” and “Collecting interest does not count as a hobby” and “It’s a financial statement, not a scorecard.” The tagline is “live richly,” as if their concern was not with my finances but my well-being. I guess just asking them to collect my checking fees, keep their ATMs full, post their money market rates, and shut up would be too much.

I can barely tolerate Philip Morris commending shopkeepers for not selling cigs to minors and Anheuser-Busch moralizing against driving drunk, because I know they’ve got a gun pointed at their heads. Citibank lacks that excuse. In a world full of busybodies, do we really need a busybody multinational bank?