LAURA SLATTERYlooks back at the week in business
THE NUMBERS
350– number of jobs saved at Linen Supply of Ireland, after it emerged from examinership.
100– number of new jobs announced by DB, a global business information provider, at a new Dublin operation in Sandyford.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK:
"Despite my best efforts, I have virtually no influence or input nito shaping Fine Gael's economic policies at this most critical time."
– Feeling unfulfilled and underappreciated, George Lee quits before the going gets good. Ah well.
"The financial markets are taking a long hard look at the fiscal accounts of all these countries and they don't like what they see"
– Simon Johnson, former chief executive of the IMF, says Greece is an extreme example of problems in several euro zone countries.
GOOD WEEK
Google
Another week, another Facebook redesign . . . non-Facebookers can take comfort in the fact that this is very annoying for the 400 million people who do use it. But over in the opposite corner of the social networking boxing ring a new heavyweight contender is limbering up for a fight: Google Buzz. Gmail users will be able to share updates, photos and videos – much as they already can on Facebook, Twitter et al – via the new service, which Google executives believe is “the poster child” for the company's future. Apparently, Buzz will use information from existing e-mail accounts to automatically show updates to people they contact regularly, using its famous algorithms to help people find the information most relevant to them. So – presumably – if A tells B they fancy C in an e-mail, C will get a Buzz update letting them know all about it, unless A makes sure to hit the privacy button before sharing. Nice.
Vancouver
The people charged with ensuring all that curling, ski-jumping and snow hire runs as smoothly as a figure skater’s 6.0 performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics have promised the city that the games will finish with a balanced budget – an especially welcome declaration for Canadians given that the smokers of Montreal spent 30 years paying off the cost of the 1976 summer games through a special tobacco tax. The Vancouver games, which open today, have been badly affected by the global recession and financial crisis, with public money having to be pumped in to complete the athletes’ village.
BAD WEEK
The G7
With few concrete agreements signed off on, it was all wintry fun and games in Iqaluit, a northern Canadian outpost near the Arctic circle, as a gaggle of finance ministers and central bankers descended on the town for a meeting of the G7, or Group of Seven advanced economies.
While Bank of England governor Mervyn King escaped from his snow-sledging photoshoot looking only a little bit silly, Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty was not so fortunate, accidentally destroying the archway of a “welcome” igloo specially constructed by Inuit builders, as he crawled out of it. Apparently the Inuit people have 237 words for idiot.
The euro zone
Investors smelled fear in the euro zone and are betting to the tune of almost $8 billion (via speculative short positions) that budget deficits in Greece, Spain and Portugal (but especially Greece) will spiral into a full-blow debt crisis. The three countries are part of the unloved “PIGS” collective created by London traders (the “I” is Ireland), but the great minds on the City trading floors now have a new acronym for countries that could suffer sovereign debt turmoil in a kind of domino effect should Greece bite the dust: it’s STUPID, aka Spain, Turkey, the UK, Portugal, Italy and Dubai. It’s the acronym that critiques itself.
