Current Account

• Would Alan Dukes make a good Central Bank governor?

  August 31, 2009 @ 5:00 pm | by Laura Slattery

  With the present incumbent John Hurley due to clear out his desk at the end of September, Paddy Power is quoting evens on Alan Dukes becoming the next governor of the Central Bank, making him the bookies’ favourite. (Read Simon Carswell’s news story on the runners and riders.) But would the former Fine Gael leader, economist and erstwhile reality TV judge (on TG4’s Feirm Factor) be a smart choice for the job?

  Judging from recent history, the criteria for the position seem to largely revolve around an ability to make dire but completely unheeded warnings about investment bubbles, a willingness to travel to Frankfurt once a fortnight and a capacity to cope with regular deckchair-rearranging within your organisation. Not being a senior civil servant in the Department of Finance has dropped off the list of necessary qualifications, it seems, given Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan’s remarks in February that “the traditional practice whereby it is axiomatic that a senior public servant should be appointed governor of the Central Bank will not be followed by me”.

  Dukes already has form when it comes to unpopular pragmatism, political expediency and a willingness to get stuck into the mess (he has been a non-executive director of Anglo Irish Bank since December 2008). But the post of Central Bank governor is supposed to be politically independent. Would Dukes be too close to the next government, or is it about time that the governor of the Central Bank was someone who the political class might actually bother to take advice from?

  If he does get, or indeed want, the job, he’ll have to work with some of the same people who he criticised on the double in July, when he attributed delays in the appointment of a new Anglo Irish Bank chief executive to regulators who he said had “proved for so long to not be very good at their job” and were “now being too perfectly careful and asking every question 10 times before they’ll give you a ‘yes’.”

  If this statement is anything to go by, Dukes as Central Bank governor would aspire to be a feather-ruffling decision-maker rather than a overly cautious elder statesman with one eye on the pension.

  The other shortlisted candidates are thought to include civil servants Kevin Cardiff (an attractive 25/1) and David Doyle (33/1), Central Bank insider Tony Grimes (11/4), Professor Patrick Honohan (Trinity College banking expert and second favourite at 7/4) and Willie Slattery (of State Street fame, no relation, at 7/1). Rounding off the Paddy Power list, somewhat inevitably, is Sean Fitzpatrick - at a generous 1000/1. Any takers?

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• France, Germany and Japan are out of recession. Who’s next?*

  August 18, 2009 @ 1:20 pm | by Laura Slattery

  Japan officially and somewhat surprisingly exited a deep “V-shaped” recession yesterday, an admirable feat given the freefall its economy went into last winter when the rest of the upgrade-addicted world suddenly made do with the cars and consumer electronics already in their possession.

  Only last February, then finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa gave what appeared to be a wine-assisted performance at a G7 news conference: not even the exciting news that Japan’s economy was contracting at the fastest rate since 1974 was enough to stave off his slumber. Now the Japanese economy has recorded annualised growth of 3.7 per cent in the April-June quarter and is up 0.9 per cent on the first quarter. There’s never a dull moment in the Japanese economy, whatever Mr Nakagawa or anyone who read the previous sentence might think.

  Japan’s rebound from the depths of despair, albeit more of a (perhaps temporary) statistical phenomenon than any reflection of how well off its citizens are feeling right now, means it joins France and Germany in the “recession-free” map of the world: last week, the two European powerhouses declared that their economies had shaken off their negative growth phases, both countries finding a way to clock up a 0.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter expansion. (Sweden and Portugal have also left their contraction days behind them for the moment, although they’re not in the G7, so we don’t care so much about them.) Which recession-battered country is next?

   * Clue: it’s not us.

  It’s not Australia, because it just about managed to dodge recession.

  It’s not China, because it never got anywhere near a recession. It’s economic growth is set to slow down to 8 per cent this year.

  It’s not Singapore, because it’s already out, laughing in the face of its downturn with a 20.7 per cent rocket in its second quarter GDP.

  It’s not Spain, because its economy shrank by more than expected in the second quarter and is declining 4.1 per cent year-on-year. Ouch!

  It’s not Ireland, because if Japan’s recovery seems improbable, a bounce by the Irish economy right now would require the improbability drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… plus a trampoline and a whole lot of collective wishful thinking. Our very own tidal wave of economic destruction can be quantified as an 8.5 per cent year-on-year decline in the first quarter. The Q2 numbers, out next month, are likely to be more flattering, but suffice to say that camping out in that Spanish villa your aunt’s boyfriend bought in 2004 seems like an attractive option.

  It could be… between the “U” countries: the US and the UK. The US has already lost its claim on the “first in, first out” theory of recession, while last week’s surprise slip in retail sales volumes showed that consumers across the Atlantic remain nervy. On the other hand, the UK remains lumbered with a broken banking system (sound familiar?) and is busy engaging in opaque experiments in quantitative easing in order to fix the mess.

  In truth, both economies are probably already going round the U-bend back into the light - yesterday a Goldman Sachs strategist told Bloomberg the US recession was ending “right now” - and who gets to claim the honour of recession-free status first may come down to something as prosaic as the financial reporting calendar.

  Both countries reported their initial (”advance”) estimates of second-quarter GDP in July, with the US Commerce Department announcing a better-than-expected 1 per cent decline and the UK Treasury declaring a worse-than-expected 0.8 per cent decline. The next estimate of the UK’s second-quarter performance, based on more complete data, is released next Friday and could revise this figure to a positive one. The US won the coin toss and gets in one day earlier on August 27th, but lately all of its revisions have been to the downside.

  My money’s on the UK… no, the US… no, the UK… or maybe neither this time around… or maybe Brazil.

  Comments (20)

• Are you hot enough to work at American Apparel?

  August 14, 2009 @ 11:01 am | by Laura Slattery

  Is it a pencil skirt or a boob tube? It’s American Apparel, so it’s probably both. The body-con, block-coloured clothing emporium opened its first outlet in Ireland earlier this month, bringing stretchy 70s-flavoured basics to the mid-market. But the big question (well, perhaps not the big question) is are its Dublin staff good looking?

  This is not a cruelly random inquiry. American Apparel chief executive Dov Charney, a man who collects lawsuits the way other CEOs collect vintage cars, has been accused of engaging in “beauty profiling” - hiring and firing on the basis of someone’s looks rather than their ability.

  A US staffer-cum-informant last month emailed the Gawker gossip blog the following insight: “One week, he (Charney) went on a huge tirade and made stores that weren’t doing well send in group photos. Why, you ask? He made store managers across the country take group photos of their employees so that he could personally judge people based on looks. He is tightening the AA ‘aesthetic,’ and anyone that he deems not good-looking enough to work there, is encouraged to be fired.”

  The company has denied that it screens for looks and said it’s style that matters. According to a spokeswoman, its T-shirts, tunic dresses and leggings are really “art supplies” that need to be shown off in suitably cool way. But appearance-based discrimination has long been common throughout fashion retailing, as well as an unspoken truth across a number of workplaces, from the shop floor to the boardroom.

  Customer-facing businesses want their customer-facing staff to have, well, nice faces. Researchers have found that beautiful people are paid more. Now this scary, eugenics-tinged practice is making its unapologetic way into retailers’ official HR handbooks with alarming alacrity (witness the outrageous “look policy” at Abercrombie & Fitch, which yesterday lost its wrongful dismissal case against a student with a prosthetic arm).

  Popping into American Apparel’s new Dublin branch opposite Trinity College to see if its staff were really that gorgeous, I was distracted at the entrance to the shop by a stand displaying an article from green culture website Beanstockd, with the unnerving headline: “It’s ok to like American Apparel.” Uh huh. So there are reasons not to like American Apparel, an innocent and totally un-bothered customer might think before heading straight for the canary yellow waist belts.

  In recent months, I’ve been massively entertained by the bizarre legal spat between Charney and film director Woody Allen, which went something like this: they used Allen’s image without consent, he called their ads “sleazy” and demanded compensation, they said you’re calling us sleazy, the judge said yes and your problem is?

  However ethical their clothing procurement policies may be, it is never good to lose the moral high ground to Woody Allen. But I’m willing to bet that 95 per cent of the people who cross American Apparel’s threshold in search of a humble hoodie have never heard of Dov Charney, much less that he has had a number of sexual harassment cases taken against him. (Every single one of his relationships and sexual encounters with staff has been consensual, okay?)

  Given what Beanstockd refers to as its “lo-fi pornographic ad campaign”, it’s not hard to conclude that sex and even accusations of sleaze are part of the sell. I think American Apparel’s ”art supplies” - the various shades of a colour detergent ad clothesline - are fabulous if you’re having a thin day or are under a certain age. There’s got to be a time and a place for gold hot pants, even if that time and place is largely confined to a Kylie Minogue music video, circa 1999. But if I buy a short skirt, I want it to just be a short skirt, free of connotations: not part of some roller-disco corporate ethos hatched by one of those tedious cult-CEO types, and especially not one with no concept of employer-employee boundaries.

  American Apparel’s clothes are tight, tight, tight. If you’re usually a “small”, don’t even think about trying on anything less than a “medium”. If you’re usually a “medium”, well you might just about scrape into a “large”. And if you’re a woman over size 12, forget about it: one look at the bandeau-style underwear will tell you everything you need to know about its target customer: young and/or flat-chested.

  So were the sales staff stunningly attractive? Of course. Forget about brushing up your CV, job-hunters: book a session with your local portrait photographer and get some smartly lit “portfolio” pics taken. We’re all models now.

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• Wrapped up in e-books

  August 10, 2009 @ 10:01 am | by Laura Slattery

  “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more,” sang The Smiths, but that was before 15kg per checked bag weight restrictions. Now stocking up on “3 for 2s” at Waterstone’s before you embark on a re-humanising holiday risks flirting with excess luggage penalties so large that you could probably pop down to your local Sony store and snap up an e-reader for cheaper.

  If you did, you’d be an early adopter, which is never much fun. Sure, you get the cachet of being able to show off your gadget to the naysayers, the Luddites and the format-fatigued, but you also have to suffer all the stop-start tricksiness that comes with being quicker off the mark than the industry itself.

  It is almost two years since Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader in the US, and it’s still not properly available here. Search for “Kindle” on electronics e-tailer Pixmania and it will offer you a heat gun, a torch, a slow cooker and a Swiss army knife set, which - while it sounds like the makings of a good night out - just isn’t the same as the joy of kindling your way through the Booker longlist on a slow train to Prague.

  Meanwhile, Sony’s non-wireless e-Readers, which are available here (€243 for the current version on Pixmania), have the misfortune to be tied into Waterstone’s e-Book store. Right now, this is a horrible, horrible site: difficult to navigate, slow to search and, thanks to the heel-dragging of fearful publishing houses, missing key titles. There’s no digital discount either: £15.19 stg for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? I’m pretty sure I can do better than that in hard copy.

   So it is with interest that I read that Sony is stepping up its battle for Stateside e-book supremacy with Amazon and bidding to bring e-readers into the mainstream. Amazon is also reported to be planning to launch Kindle in the UK (followed, presumably, by Ireland) before Christmas, although they said that last year. But will lower prices for both e-readers and e-books be enough to convince the bookbuying public to ditch their paperbacks for good?

  In the “no” corner, there are the ownership niggles, as Ciara O’Brien discusses on her technology blog. Then there are the practical limits. Holidays are supposed to be for recharging the batteries - your own. No one wants to spend half their break searching for the conversion plug they swore they packed or fretting on the beach about whether their e-reader has enough power to get them to the final chapter. Thirdly, there is the loss of romance and identity that comes with digitally disguising your taste in literature. (Curiously, the Sony E-Reader PRS 505 promises to hold “unabridged” versions of 160 books, as if e-reader buyers are really toy lovers who might be content with abridged versions.)

  In the “yes” corner, there is the obvious joy from merging your library with your daily news feeds in one lightweight tablet. On that note, Rupert Murdoch last week signalled that The Wall Street Journal (his newest baby) had negotiated a higher percentage of the revenues from Kindle subscriptions. The newspaper industry is belatedly getting tough with every other business that profits from their free content, not just Amazon. But you don’t bother making threats against something you believe to be an inconsequential gimmick, and huffing and puffing about withdrawing The Wall Street Journal from Kindle over a row about subscriber names if anything reveals how much a part of the future media landscape Murdoch thinks e-readers will be.

  Ironically, the rise of the e-book could spur a concurrent resurgence in bookshelf-friendly hardbacks, as publishing houses delay the release of low-margin digital versions and lengthen the period in which only earnings-enhancing hardbacks are available. But just as record labels started making more of a design effort with CD packaging after iTunes took off, putting care and attention into hardbacks is also the smart way for publishers to snaffle cash from price-insensitive booklovers who don’t want to sacrifice the look, feel and smell of a finely typeset novel.

  E-books, after all, don’t furnish a room.

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• Friends disconnected

  August 6, 2009 @ 8:46 pm | by Laura Slattery

  After spending half the Noughties wondering what exactly they should do with this website thingy, ITV has managed to offload Friends Reunited on the publisher of the Beano for a not-so-cool £25 million (€29 million). Sounds like a lot for a website, but then Facebook recently sold a mere 2 per cent of itself for the rather more flattering $200 million (€140 million), valuing its mix of chatter feeds, “which superhero are you” quizzes and incessant smugness at $10 billion.

  Strangely, there was a time when Friends Reunited, the social networking site of yesteryear, was an amazing novelty. Fancy being able to get in touch with people you went to school with! Surely, that’s like crossing into some alternative universe where fractures in the space-time continuum are creating all manner of unscripted chaos.

  Horror stories used to surface in the tabloid press of fortysomething wives leaving their stunned husbands for the boy they fancied when they were 17 - a moral outrage blamed entirely on the new technology, of course. These days, there’s no need for furtive subscriptions. Facebookers think nothing of openly flirting with friends on each other’s walls, knowing full well that both their partner and the friend’s partners can monitor every interaction - as can hundreds of other friends-of-friends should they be having a particularly boring day at work.

  Meanwhile, having been hounded down and tracked with military precision by a procession of mostly recognisable faces (albeit swollen with age), no one’s getting too excited by the prospect of “reuniting” with old friends anymore. Instead, the etiquette of “de-friending” is commonly debated in safely non-digital surroundings.

  ITV, unable to shake off its heritage as a lumbering broadcaster with a strictly analogue attitude to innovation, has been accused of dithering with Friends Reunited since it bought it in 2005. But savvier players in the social networking sphere than the company that brings us The Jeremy Kyle Show have been undone by users’ ennui: witness today’s announcement of impairment charges at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media, the owner of MySpace.

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• Bonuses are back (and so are shoulder pads)

  August 5, 2009 @ 3:48 pm | by Laura Slattery

  You can’t get away from bankers these days. Settling down with a desk-bound ham roll for my weekly update on the status of Jennifer Aniston’s love life (a flick through Grazia magazine), my escape from the financial world was cruelly thwarted by a three-page spread on ex-banker Barbara Stcherbatcheff, author of the forthcoming book Confessions of a City Girl, under the provocative headline “bankers… we’re worth every penny”. Not that she actually says that.

  Stcherbatcheff gives Grazia a taster of her “glory days” in London’s Square Mile (or “Viagra Triangle”), where life as a 365 pound an hour financial consultant allowed her and her mostly male colleagues to live like Russian oligarchs enjoying a permanent Christmas: “A 400 pound bottle of vintage champagne was for wimps - we only dealt in magnums, ideally brought to our tables six at a time with sparklers in the corks.” Even as Lehman Brothers closed, there was a party to dissect to news. Most people blamed the Wall Street traders, the bank chief execs or George Bush. The villain list was long enough to leave little time for self-examination: “It never once occurred to us to see ourselves our culpable.”

  Now the buzzword in London is BAB (bonuses are back), and it’s almost party time again - but not for Stcherbatcheff, who has left investment banking to become a financial journalist. No bonuses there, and definitely no magnums. She’s clearly got a sense of humour though, if this surely satirical appeal for women to ”fight for positions in the big banks” is anything to go by:

  “It won’t be easy,” she notes. “Many new recruits will probably have to work their way up from the back office to the front office, like I did. They’ll have to listen to sexist jokes and get dragged to dive bars, strip bars, and cigar clubs when the markets are closed. They’ll be mocked for being interested in handbags and shoes - by City boys who are clinically obsessed by Patek Philippe watches and Hermes ties.”

  So, um, yes, go for it, ladies. Sounds wonderful. But first, turn to page 70 for next season’s 80s-inspired workwear.

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• The Barney school of management

  August 4, 2009 @ 1:29 pm | by John Collins

  A bit of humour to get you back into things after the Bank Holiday.

  From @dberesford on Twitter (where we are @IrishTimesBiz):

  “In a real ‘barney meeting’ (I love you, you love me, but nothing is going to happen)”

  Who knew the purple dinosaur so beloved of the under-4s had insights to offer on the world on the world of work?

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