Apple is joining a long line of poor companies who have gone cap in hand to the Island’s debt market in the hopes of flogging a billion dollars of bonds. The US dollar bonds will last for 30 years.

The Tame Apple Press is doing its best to claim that it is perfectly normal for blue-chip multinationals to regularly issue dollar bonds of such size on the island. It cited Intel which flogged $915 million of 30-year bonds with yields of 4.7 percent

But the question is why Apple needs the cash given that it already has more cash on hand than it can reasonably know what to do with. What it is lacking is product and a cunning plan on how to get new ideas.

The planned Apple bonds will not be redeemable for the first two years. Which means that anyone who buys them cannot off-load them until well after the iPhone 7 successor has proven to be a damp squib but just before Apple might have a self-driving car sorted out.