One restaurateur in New York has found an ingenious and socially responsible way out of the credit crunch. The owner of Comfort, an organic café in the quaintly named Hastings-on-Hudson, is halfway through opening a second one, and the bank has withdrawn support. This is typical small-town America — everyone knows everyone, and this is the only restaurant on a small strip devastated by car-friendly chain stores and malls elsewhere.

So John Halko is selling VIP cards, credit cards that, for every dollar spent on them, reward customers with $1.20 of credit at each restaurant. Halko gets the cashflow up front to complete the second establishment; customers get a 20 per cent return on their “investment”. They also have a vested interest in using his outlets, rather than going elsewhere, and in eating locally, and they have a stake in the business's success, encouraging them to tell their friends and drum up custom.

Now there are suggestions, says BoingBoing, a techie website, that other businesses in the village might also accept his card for their services, creating what would be effectively a parallel currency.

Dormant accounts, and also strangely silent

Are the banks cooking their books to avoid having to hand over dormant assets, the contents of accounts that haven't been used for a while? One Labour MP thinks so. The Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill would require them to track down the owners, but Martyn Jones, MP for Clwyd South, claims that one bank told him privately in 2004 that it held about £400 million in dormant assets; now it claims the figure is closer to £50 million.

I ask his researcher if Jones would like to release the name of this bank apparently caught behaving dishonestly. 'Fraid not. “He got the information through conditions of anonymity.” Of course.

— One victim of the collapse of GuestInvest, the hotel business, is a play commissioned by the company from a colleague on this paper, Damian Barr. Lillie Langtry: Don't Let Us Fuss, Please was intended to publicise the link with the actress to a hotel on the Brewery, Chiswell Street site where GuestInvest was intending to build. The favourite of Edward VII had a few cashflow problems herself, I am reminded.

— Jazz FM is back, along with Richard Wheatly and much of the old team at the station. The first track broadcast last night was Art Pepper's All The Things You Are. Promising; but time will tell if there really is an appetite for an entire station of jazz. There certainly wasn't last time around.

— Minister on the move

Farewell, then, Kitty Ussher, whose switch from the role of City minister at the Treasury to a new job at the Department of Work and Pensions went largely unremarked in last week's reshuffle. One of the brighter denizens of the lower depths of the Brown administration, she had been in post only since last summer and had taken four months off for maternity leave.

The MP for Burnley and former enthusiast for the euro made herself popular enough in the City during her short tenure, but you have to wonder whether a little more continuity might be advisable. There is effectively a job swap with Stephen Timms, who was at the DWP but now goes to the Treasury.

Just how the brief between him and the other arrivals, Ian Pearson and Paul Myners, the new City minister, is divided remains to be seen. Timms joined the DWP only this year, to judge from his Commons biog. How much time does anyone get, in all this frantic Brownian motion, to master their brief?

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