QUOTE OF THE WEEK:"There's no recession. It's a pre-boom."
- Damian Ryan, manager of Dublin pub Doheny & Nesbitt, offers up the sunniest of euphemisms to reporters for the Bloomberg news wire service, as customers switch from spirits to pints to make their drinks last longer.
THE NUMBERS
13,900
Number of people in Ireland who, according to the Central Statistics Office and Forfás, are working in the category of job that is probably most frequently mentioned in Government press releases: research and development (R&D).
26,700
Number of people who joined the Live Register of unemployment benefit claimants in February, as the retail, construction and financial services sectors shed jobs.
GOOD WEEK
Mattress savers
Wouldn't trust a senior bank executive to give you the correct change out of a tenner, never mind look after your life savings? Well, if you really want to brave the interest-free, insurance-free world of under-the-mattress cash storage, bed manufacturer Feather & Black has the product for you - a new bed that conceals a safe. Managing director Robbie Feather said the bed started as a "tongue-in-cheek" idea but he was now confident it would appeal to homeowners who mistrust banks but are worried about a recession crime wave.
Eurotunnel investors
Who could begrudge the 500,000 shareholders in Eurotunnel their first dividend after 20 years of financial hiccups and stopstart Anglo-French transport co-operation? Shareholders who backed the underwater cross-Channel link will collect a grand 2.2p per share for their trouble as Eurotunnel overcame the weakness of sterling, rising security costs and a serious fire to turn a profit of €40 million last year.
BAD WEEK
AIG
Not content with reporting the biggest corporate loss in US history, the crisis-stricken insurance company is now being sued by its former chairman Hank Greenberg, who says half his personal fortune - a not-to-be-sniffed-at sum of $2 billion (€1.59 billion) - fell into a black hole at the company because it failed to tell shareholders of vast losses being run up at its London office. Greenberg says he "never dreamed that even incompetence could destroy the company", once the biggest insurer in the world.
The world's poor
According to a Unesco Global Monitoring Report, some 390 million Africans will see their incomes plummet by 20 per cent due to the drying up of investment flows into poorer countries and the sharp fall in commodity prices. The authors of the report say this will cost sub-Saharan Africa's poorest people about €36 each, proportionately more than the cost of the credit crunch in the developed world, and will result in an increase of 200,000 to 400,000 instances of infant mortality.
