FROM BANGKOK TO PHUKET AND BACK TO BANGKOK WITH A BIT OF MORAL HAZARD THROWN IN

My stepson only has one day to go before he flies back home from Thailand after nearly three weeks away.

Since my last update here, he had a big row with his friends in Bangkok after the third day of their holiday. It seemed they wanted to spend loads of money getting drunk and going off with prostitutes. My stepson, concerned that the prostitutes looked very young, was concerned that his limited budget wouldn't last the holiday. Though he though about curtailing his holiday and flying back home, he decided to make his own way without his friends from Bangkok to Phuket.

On balance, I (but not my wife) thought he would get in less trouble being a beach bum without his friends in Phuket than with his friends in Bangkok full of temptation. My calculation was based on a balance of probabilities though.

In Phuket my stepson befriended a few fellow tourists, sampled Thai food and even visited a Buddhist temple. He said he was having a good time.

Two weeks into his holiday, my stepson phoned his mother asking for money. My wife said before he flew off to Thailand that he didn't have much money. I was of the view that if he didn't have enough to last three weeks in Thailand then he should never have gone in the first place. But my stepson plays the so-called moral hazard game that banks played before many banks crashed in the global financial crisis over ten years ago.

Now I know I'm going off on a tangent here but please bear with me. Hopefully it will make sense. In the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, banks believed that governments would bail them out if they went bust because the moral consequences for governments of not bailing them out were politically too high to incur. The banks calculated rightly; governments bailed the banks out by taking control of some of them, by underwriting  their bad debt and/or by buying their financial assets (known as quantitative easing). This is called moral hazard by economists. This is what my stepson does though he's not aware of what he's doing. He puts himself in positions where he knows that he will be bailed out by his family.

I've bailed my stepson out once before. He had racked up a big debt to a drug dealer and, after being beaten up badly, his mother asked me and his brother to pay off his debt. We did. I didn't get one word of thanks from him for this. Similarly when my stepson wanted to move out of my apartment and live in an unfurnished rented house with his then girlfriend, I paid for the house to get furnished with furniture and stuff for the kitchen. I probably gave him nearly £2,000 in this venture. No thanks again. But not only that, he trashed the house after his girlfriend had split from him. And when I say trash, I mean set fire to furniture. Not one bit of stuff, not even an inflammable teaspoon, came back when he returned to my apartment. I wasn't particularly upset about the money I had wasted but I was upset about an oak desk. My Dad gave me the oak desk and when I 'gave' it my stepson for his new home - he was a student at the time, I told him I wanted it back. The desk never came back. It was trashed!

Now getting back to the subject, when my stepson asked for money from my wife I was concerned. Though my wife and I have separate bank accounts, our finances are effectively shared. I wouldn't have been happy for my wife to have bailed out my stepson because I knew that money would eventually have come from my bank account. She bails him out and then she asks me for money to buy groceries, etc.

Thankfully my wife refused to bail my stepson out in Thailand. I presume he got bailed out by his Dad again - he was the one who forked out the money to sort out his mess over the plane tickets.

In another phone call to his mother, my stepson claimed his bank card was cloned and that sums of money had disappeared from his bank account, which may partly explain why he had run out of money while in Thailand. He said that a bar he had frequented had used his bank card details to take money out of his bank account. I have no way of knowing whether that's the truth or not.

After a few days in Phuket, his two friends from Bangkok joined him. But he had a row with them again. This time I can see the problem he was having with them.. One of his drunken friends was caught on CCTV, now doing the rounds on Instagram, grabbing a woman's bum while walking on the streets of Phuket. I suspect after paying for prostitutes, he felt entitled.

My stepson was appalled - good on him - and decided to split from them again. He lew back to Bangkok on his own. He only has one day to go, surely he can't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

I think on balance (of probabilities) he's done quite well on holiday, notwithstanding his initial problem of booking his flights to Thailand. I'm not going as far as to say that I'm proud of him but there are signs that he's at last growing up. He is 30 years of age. Now I know I'm hard on him, but I was soft on him a while back. It's that moral hazard thing!

Now this is a long post! Sorry.