“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With its description of life in Paris and London before and after the French Revolution of 1789, with machinations and ruinations, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Citiesis aptly named for those engaged in the business of right-time, right-place real estate investing. With his evocative descriptions of the minutiae of contemporary daily routine, Dickens often features as a source for quotations in property articles, but rarely in this context.

While decisions on the future direction and health-and-wealth of the world’s banking industry were being taken — or more accurately, as far as the US Congress was concerned, not taken — almost daily in capital cities around the world in early October 2008 and while financial markets were being driven crazy by the uncertainty and lack of confidence that the banking crisis, and the apparent difficulty in agreeing on how to solve it, was gen