Since the global economic meltdown, much thought – and more money – has been expended shoring up the foundations of our financial system. In an implicit acknowledgement that either, 1) the crisis is over or, 2) we’re all doomed, Philips Electronics and ABN Amro have teamed up to declare that the solution lies in the same technology behind the mood rings so fashionable in the 1960s and the shade-shifting Global Hypercolor T-shirts popular among idiots in the early 1990s.

Philips/ABN’s brainchild is the Rationalizer. It consists of a bracelet that monitors the wearer’s emotional state via a skin sensor, and is linked to a secondary appliance that translates these measurements into colours. The idea is that when the trader discerns a forbidding red glow, he will realise that he’s under too much stress to make calm decisions, and shall therefore recoil from betting your pension fund on spaghetti farms.

If only the world were so simple, or so rational. We might as well have saved our bail-out cash and consulted runic stones or the entrails of deceased animals.