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• All I want for Christmas is a his ‘n’ hers light aircraft

  October 30, 2009 @ 7:05 pm | by Laura Slattery

  

  The Society for the Containment of Christmas won’t be too happy, but with postal strikes hitting the UK and the possibility remaining of a fresh econaclypse / swine flu outbreak between now and December 25th, there’s not a moment too soon to turn your attention to this year’s Christmas runners and riders… the grown-up gifts that are not as boring as “grown-up gifts” sounds… the goodies that probably won’t be coming my way, but somebody somewhere will have the joy of giving/receiving sometime before we leave this debacle of a decade behind us.

  1. An e-reader: With a new generation of tablet devices on the cusp of being launched into the techie-verse, the long-term practical benefits of single-function e-readers are far from certain. But then the ghosts of Christmas past are haunted with gadgets of varying degrees of dodgy-ness. Amazon says its Kindle e-reader (circa €240) is currently its top-selling product - more popular even than Dan Brown. Buyers will have to weigh up the aesthetic pleasures of, say, a metallic hot pink Sony Reader Pocket (€199) versus a smartly jacketed hardback.
  Pros: You get to flatter your intended gift recipient by alluding to the fact that they’re a big reader without actually having to make a hazardous guess as to their taste in literature.
  Cons: They’re no iPhone.

  2. Nintendo Wii: Despite the best efforts of erstwhile children’s TV presenters Ant and Dec to flog the delights of Nintendo’s goodies to thirtysomething kidults, sales of the Japanese company’s flagship Wii consoles are something of a dwindling fire, according to a trading update issued this week, which blamed a lack of strong software titles. Now Wii Fit Plus, the new edition of Wii Fit, has been given official backing from the NHS, which should help introduce the joys of virtual hula-hooping and ski slalom to fans of living room fitness.
  Pros: Excellent “gateway drug” to real games, apparently.
  Cons: Avoid the Wii Fit add-on if you want to avoid “do you think I’m fat” style accusations of insensitivity on Christmas day.

  3. An Icon A5 light sport aircraft: As advertised in the Christmas catalogue for upmarket US retailer Neiman Marcus. The “his ‘n’ hers” light aircraft will set you back €167,000 and comes with luxury fittings and flight training for two. Over to the brochure: “The kids are healthy. The careers are under control… You’ve earned something special, just for the two of you… Something amazing, exciting, and most certainly romantic. How about turning sci-fi into reality with a his & hers luxury sports vehicle - in the air.”
  Pros: The wings fold up for easy storage. If you’ve got a massive garage.
  Cons: Won’t be delivered until 2011.

  4. Gold bars: Ditch the ice, this year there’s nothing that says recession-proof like a slab of shiny gold - and no one can say you’re not staying true to the spirit of Christmas. The price of gold has soared this year to more than $1,000 an ounce, as super-rich investors failed to find anything as steadfastly valuable as precious metals to pour their cash into. Now Harrods is selling bars of pure Swiss gold bullion, ranging from a lipstick-sized 1g to a standard issue 12.5kg block, and they’re all on display in a mini-vault on its lower ground floor.
  Pros: Will cost at least six digits, but if gold prices keep climbing, you can make a profit if you decide to bring it back to the shop. Maybe.
  Cons: You could pick up Gold: The Best of Spandau Ballet for less than a tenner instead.

  5. Nothing: Dislike the commercialism of Christmas? Not really in the light aircraft league? Express your disdain by purchasing a big ball of Nothing this festive season, courtesy of iwantoneofthose.com. The tagline: “This lovingly crafted vial of emptiness is filled to the brim with unfettered nothingness. Free from the burden of possessions, the weight of responsibility, Nothing is as idiotic as it is brilliant.”
  Pros: You can get Nothing gift-wrapped.
  Cons: Might prompt an awkward ”very funny, now where’s my real present” response.

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• A pint of unspecific please, Peggy

  October 21, 2009 @ 12:38 am | by Laura Slattery

  

  I don’t understand the logic of the current rules on product placement in television programmes, either from the perspective of a viewer (which I am) or a regulator (which I’m not, although I am available Eamon Ryan should you wish to nominate someone who actually watches television). At the moment, the practice is outlawed in Ireland on the basis that it’s surreptitious advertising, which I think must be regulator code for “almost as sneaky as subliminal advertising but not quite as glaringly unsophisticated as straightforward advertorial”.

  How else to explain the latitude granted to TV3’s The Apprentice? Complaints about the first series appear to have gone nowhere. I’m not complaining, as the show wouldn’t exist without its sponsors and we would be sadly deprived of the Schadenfreude that comes from watching Team Megatron and Team Sparta (or whatever) bicker and crumble as they fail to transform themselves into hotshot television ad directors (the synergy!) by lunchtime. Given they’re all very busy participating in hour-long advertisements for whichever sponsor’s products form the basis of the task that particular week, I think we can cut the 110-percenters some slack.

  So why is TV3 being cut a fair whack of slack? Product placement is defined in the old Broadcasting Commission of Ireland’s general advertising code – now inherited by the new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland – as “the inclusion of, or reference to, a product or service within a programme in return for payment or similar consideration to the programme maker or broadcaster for the specific purpose of promoting that product or service”. And it’s banned.

  However… “Incidental references to products or services in a programme are legitimate where their inclusion within the programme is editorially justified.”

  Ah. It could certainly be argued that the references to Meteor et al in The Apprentice are editorially justified in the context of the show’s task-centric format, although how anyone could describe them as “incidental”, I’m not sure. Certainly, it is true that the Irish version of the show, with its umpteen sponsors, tends to have more brand-oriented tasks than the British version, which is broadcast on the BBC and often features small businesses whose names you never quite catch.

  To recap: The Apprentice, with its orgy of brands, is allowed. But payment for “surreptitious”, by which to say, relatively unobtrusive, “wallpaper” product placement – for example, Cadbury bars in the Carrigstown corner shop – is not permitted. You do see brands on Fair City and Hollyoaks and most soaps and dramas, but broadcasters are not allowed to make money out of them. I interviewed a Fair City producer about this subject in 2001 and he told me “it was impossible to do something like a soap opera and keep it credible without having ordinary brands on display”, adding – quite reasonably – “if we didn’t, we would have to make them up ourselves”.

  You could do that, of course: Coronation Street has its Newton and Ridley ale, while residents of Albert Square test the bounds of credibility by simply asking for “a lager” – a quirk satirised yonks ago by impressionist Alistair McGowan as “a pint of unspecific, please Peggy”.

  But “a pint of unspecific” is not the direction in which the industry is moving. With revenues from regular TV ads on the wane, the UK is now considering allowing product placement, a move that would surely signal a change in the rules in Ireland too, as Richard Gillis outlines.

  Under the advertising code, the paid-for inclusion of brands in a programme acquired from outside of Ireland doesn’t count as product placement “provided that no broadcaster regulated in the state… directly benefits from the arrangement”. So if the British government changes its rules, ITV could rake in revenues from stuffing the Rover’s Return with Bacon Fries, but TV3 wouldn’t be allowed to cash in. That doesn’t seem quite fair, really.

  Okay, so product placement has the potential to get out of hand, especially if it was to start infiltrating the script writing process. But advertisers know that too much cheese will make us turn off. And personally I’d rather see my screen dotted with occasional brands if it meant fewer in-your-face “editorially justified” Apprentice-style promotions, more cash for the production coffers and the obliteration of ad breaks proper. Now if only they’d ban annoying split-screen advertising over end credits…

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• Google in upbeat mood in Killarney

  October 19, 2009 @ 3:40 pm | by John Collins

  KILLARNEY, CO KERRY: Three chartered trains and at least six private planes descended on the Kingdom this morning. The mini-invasion of young shiny happy people attired in jeans and t-shirts was not the vanguard of some new religous movement. Google has come to town.

  Thousands of Google employees, or Googlers as they like to call themselves, are in the south west for Engage 09, a sales conference for staff from the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The mood is upbeat and not just because Google, which is regularly voted one of the best places to work, has a young and vibrant workforce that it takes good care of.

  Last week the internet giant, which now spans everything from mobile phones to a nascent PC operating system that will pit it squarely against Microsoft, as well as its core search engine, posted strong growth in third quarter revenues and profits. Revenues for the three months for the beginning of July to the end of September were up 7 per cent on 2008’s figures at $5.9 billion and net profit was up 27 per cent to $1.64 billion.

  The approximately 2,500 Googlers, who are providing an Autumn revenue injection to the Brehon and Glen Eagles hotels in the Kerry town, will also be buoyed that their employer is now firmly an international player. The third quarter figures show that 53 per cent of revenues now come from outside the US. The €3.1 billion of international revenues announced on Thursday last was an increase of 19 per cent. The firm, which employs about 1,500 staff in Dublin at a European operations centre, doesn’t break out country by country figures, except for the US and British markets. Sales in Britain were down one per cent but while the company blamed that on foreign exchange fluctuations and weak macro economic conditions its conference call with analysts suggested it was the former rather than the latter that did the damage.

  Despite this slight blip on an otherwise upbeat announcement, Eric Schmidt, chief executive proclaimed “The worst of the recession clearly behind us and because of what we have seen we now have the confidence to be optimistic about our future and we’re going to invest as a result, and that I think is ultimately good for the long term of Google.”

  Schmidt is in Killarney (having reportedly piloted his own plane here), along with his global head of sales Nikesh Arora, to address the assembled Googlers. I’m attending a media round table with him this afternoon and the results of the interview will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

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• Ireland’s lost decade… a wiki-tale yet to be written?

  @ 12:04 am | by Laura Slattery

  So. “Ireland v Japan discuss.” I’m not endorsing it, but undergraduates with assignments to write on the factors that led us from 100 per cent mortgages and predictions of a soft landing to nationalisations and Nama in the space of two years could do worse than to give a quick onceover to the following piece of wiki-faction:

  “The Lost Decade is the time after the Irish asset price bubble collapsed, which occurred gradually rather than catastrophically. The Lost Decade consists of the years 2008-??? The strong economic growth of the 1990s ended abruptly in 2008. In the years 2002-2007, abnormalities within the Irish economic system had fuelled a massive wave of speculation by Irish companies, banks and securities companies. A combination of exceptionally high land values and exceptionally low interest rates briefly led to a position in which credit was both easily available and extremely cheap. This led to massive borrowing, the proceeds of which were invested mostly in domestic property… this bubble was unsustainable… leading to a massive crash in the stock market. It also led to a debt crisis; a large proportion of the debts that had been run up turned bad, which in turn led to a crisis in the banking sector, with many banks being bailed out by the government.”

  It’s a wiki-tale yet to be written. Except it already has - for Japan. The above passage is the opening paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry for the Lost Decade of Japan, with only the words in italics changed. You can read the rest of the entry here. The story gets worse before it gets better. Citing a 2008 article by Michael Schuman of Time magazine (who in his case was comparing Japan to the Detroit motor industry), it includes the familiar phrase “Too Big To Fail” (TBTF). One economist, Schuman noted, described Japan’s policies of bailing out its bankrupt banks as “a loser’s paradise”.

  So are we in our own loser’s paradise? I was pretty surprised when there was little mention of Nama at the annual Dublin Economic Workshop policy conference in Kenmare this weekend. (Pat Farrell, chief executive of Irish Banking Federation, alternated between criticising weak banking supervision - yes, really - and lobbying for less regulation for the IFSC.) I guess, economists must be just as sick of Nama talk as the public, as the schedule allowed for only one presentation on the subject and it was from Morgan Kelly, the property crash soothsayer once dubbed “Mortgage Kelly” round these parts. That was in happier times.

  Kelly describes Nama as “a very simple idea, cash for trash”. Rival economists don’t much like the UCD economist’s style, which comes heavily peppered with sarcastic one-liners. “People say about the Lost Decade… [it happened] because these guys didn’t have Nama,” he said, adding wearily: “The Japanese tried pretty much everything.” Meanwhile, the assumptions in the draft Nama business plan, published last week, are all “at the extreme upper tail of optimism”, Kelly said: “When you have every assumption like that, you no longer have a forecast, you have a fantasy.”

  Not everyone believes the Government’s assumptions - the conditions necessary for Nama to breakeven or make a profit - are rose-tinted, fingers-crossed, wishful thinking, however. Take, for example, the Department of Finance’s projection that there will be a 20 per cent default rate by borrowers on the €77 billion loans that will be transferred to the “bad bank”. This, it said, was double the 10 per cent default rate experienced by Barclays bank during the UK property crash in the early 1990s. And these developer-types have a strong moral compass, right? Surely, no more than a fifth of them will be non-performers?

  But Barclays is not the right comparison to make, argues Kelly. Its losses were across its whole loan book, taking in safer residential mortgages as well as buy-to-letters and Anglo-esque property development speculators. The Nama assets are more akin to those of the Japanese commercial development banks known as the “Jusen”, he thinks. By 1991, 38 per cent of those loans were non-performing. Several injections of taxpayers’ money later, they were finally wound up in 1995, by which point 75 per cent of the loans were non-performing and 60 per cent of them had been deemed completely unrecoverable. Forget TBTF. The banks, he concluded, are Too Big To Save.

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• Ellison and Benioff: best of frenemies

  October 14, 2009 @ 8:39 pm | by Karlin Lillington

  

  From SAN FRANCISCO:  In the modern technology world of open standards and interoperability, where vendors have to make their own stuff work with competitors’ stuff, the concept of the ‘frenemy’ thrives. A portmanteau blend of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, frenemies are typically the outspoken silverback chief executives of aggressive, large tech firms. One week, at one conference, they will be touting their close relationship. The next week they will be dissing each other’s products. Even better if they once worked with or for each other, or sat on each other’s boards.

  Ticking all these boxes in a deeply satisfying way are Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff. They were initially the best of friends, with Ellison providing financial then board-level advisory support to fledgling Software.com. Then, when it became clear the two companies were directly vying for customers, they became the best of enemies.

  But all seems forgiven. In a surprise move, Oracle invited Benioff to make a presentation at its massive annual OpenWorld conference this week in San Francisco. Benioff was still held at arm’s length and kept in decontamination at an adjacent theatre, safely away from the main stages in the Moscone Convention Centre, but along with his guest Michael Dell (see what we mean about silverbacks?) he drew a packed crowd willing to queue outside in an unseasonable downpour for a seat (I’m sure it had nothing to do with giving away Flip HD video cameras to 500 lucky attendees).

  On stage, an ebullient Benioff was beyond polite in magnanimous praise for Oracle, his career there and Larry’s early support for Salesforce. com. He gave an excellent keynote that outshone the dry and somewhat dull presentations on Monday and Tuesday from Oracle executives, HP’s Ann Livermore and Michael Dell. And he was clear about why he was there: both Oracle and Salesforce.com have realised that customers like to run Oracle and use Salesforce.com’s cloud computing apps. Why not cross-promote?

  Did he win any new customers? Probably: in particular, the demo of a customer service application that allows an agent to pull in content from Twitter, Google and Facebook was well received and very impressive (rightly, Salesforce recognises that this is how customers look for help with a product; they don’t necessarily call customer support anymore). But there were clearly many there just to see how in the world Benioff would manage an Oracle gig (though Oracle employees were not allowed in, to their annoyance). And of course, there were some there for a Flip HD.

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• Michael O’Leary must be thrilled by Panorama’s paean to Ryanair

  @ 1:22 pm | by Laura Slattery

  “Infamy, infamy - Panorama has it infamy!” is the catchline on the eagerly issued rant from the Ryanair press office. Except it isn’t a rant at all, of course, but another work of comic genius. Point number 11 on its counter-claims to Panorama’s Monday night show on BBC1 goes like this: “Panorama claimed that ‘O’Leary is a bully’ - this is clearly false when the whole world knows that O’Leary is a kind and gentle, caring and thoughtful, sensitive and saintly human being widely beloved by all Ryanair’s 6,5000 people and” - you guessed it - “its 66 million passengers.”

  Yesterday, O’Leary went on Newstalk’s breakfast show to, ostensibly, unleash the full flow of his no-frills indignation on the BBC, but like the press releases and the claims that Panorama did a “hatchet job” on the airline, this is nonsense. Anyone who watched the show, titled Why do people hate Ryanair?, will know that it was probably the most favourable bit of coverage the airline has ever had from a broadcaster like the BBC, for whom being seen to be balanced is paramount. At the end, viewers would have been left mystified as to why exactly people do love to hate Ryanair, not convinced that it’s a hateful company.

  Time was when Ryanair passengers who came a cropper showed up on television it was to complain that Ryanair’s complaints policy largely seemed to involve sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “no refunds” on a loop. But Panorama featured a family who actually managed to get a refund for a Ryanair screw-up at Stansted airport, we were told. Wow - this global recession must have turned O’Leary soft. Even the design of the website has been changed to make it easier to avoid accidentally buying travel insurance, Panorama said, which must surely be disappointing news to knowing flight bookers who take pleasure in outfoxing the website’s quirks.

  The programme also generously featured two young pro-Ryanair travellers, one of whom had a penchant for drop-of-your-hat trips from the UK to Dublin for 2p - and even had his own handling fee-free Visa Electron card - and another who related how he had flown to Stockholm, Brussels and a plethora of other European cities that he never would have been able to afford to see were it not for Ryanair. Even Ryanair’s love of flying to secondary airports was treated with the humour that this old news deserves.

  Panorama’s problem, journalistically, was that ”Ryanair has revolutionised travel for the masses” has been slightly less done to death than “Ryanair sucks”, so their “agenda” clearly leaned towards the former. The real scoop was that O’Leary dropped his deadpan act for a fleeting moment. The show ended with reporter Vivian White and the Ryanair boss both collapsing into laughter during an on-camera standoff: O’Leary was still chuckling as he walked away. It was all excellent free publicity.

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• Should borrowers be forced to opt for bankruptcy-lite IVAs?

  October 12, 2009 @ 1:30 pm | by Laura Slattery

  Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told The Irish Times last week that a percentage of the debt of mortgaged-to-the-hilt people in negative equity should be lopped off. This, he said, would assist economic activity, by alleviating the sense of entrapment that people feel. It’s an easy stimulus that would also create more realistic bank balance sheets. (Read Colm Keena’s interview with Stiglitz here.) It also sounds attractively like getting a voucher for money off after you’ve paid for the (overpriced) goods. Please quote the promotional code “NAMA”.

  One day later and the renewed Programme for Government proposed by Fianna Fail and the Green Party were touting the arrival of IVAs, or individual voluntary arrangements, a kind of court-free bankruptcy-lite process currently available to UK residents. Under an IVA, debt-riddled consumers can get a certain percentage of their debts written off if they come clean and - via the mediation of an insolvency adviser (a private company!) - successfully persuade three-quarters of their creditors to agree to a new schedule of reduced repayments. If they do, this is then binding on all the creditors.

  Hmmm. This is just not the same thing at all. Sure, it might mean that some people who would be evicted from their homes under the current system would live to pay another loan repayment. Superficially, it seems like a good deal for bedraggled borrowers if they can get 62 per cent of their debts written off (the average last year in the UK). But IVAs can be insidious voluntary arrangements, too. For a start, it stands to reason that lenders would not agree to an IVA if they didn’t think they would work in their favour.

  In the middle, a swathe of licensed insolvency advisers take their cut (in the UK, this is usually a couple of grand). That might generate a spot of employment for some out-of-work mortgage brokers: IVAs become next season’s debt consolidation deals. But are commercial insolvency practitioners really the kind of jobs that we want to create? Needless to say while others are enriching themselves on the back of the difficulties you’ve suffered as a result of the mismanaged economy, your credit rating will be flushed down the toilet (not that banks will be lending to anyone anyway).

  The scheduled repayments, which typically last three to five years, are rigid, formal agreements: if you can’t keep to it, you are plunged into the very bankruptcy you were hoping to avoid.  I know, that sounds a lot like a mortgage or any other loan. But borrowers were motivated by the desire for security (not greed) when they signed up to a mortgage. Sign your name to an IVA and you are effectively admitting culpability: your debt, your problem. That may be fine, but it does absolve the Government from having to force Ireland’s zombie banks to reduce borrowers’ debts in a manner that admits their culpability.

  The Government is “overpaying” for the Nama assets by some €7 billion over the current market value. Asked why, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan said this: “We’re talking about distressed loans, we’re talking about a distressed market, and you are entitled to make some allowance for long-term value… After all, if you look at it from the point of view of the bank – which is not a popular way to look at it, I accept that – why wouldn’t they just hold onto the loans and work them out themselves, if there was absolutely no premium involved?”

  If you’re feeling a little shivery reading that, then it’s probably because you know you’re not going to get your “premium”, even though you’re a part of that distressed market too. Instead, you’ll be getting an economy marred by cuts to wages and welfare that will only increase the real value of your debts. Without a corresponding reduction in your loans, this painful slump will last a lot longer for everyone.

  Of course, existing court debt enforcement procedures are Dickensian and individual voluntary arrangements - key word “individual” - as they exist in the UK will help reform this particular problem and spare some misery. But they are not the right mechanism to prevent Ireland’s zombie banks from breeding zombie consumers.

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• Twitter puts the figs in the fig rolls

  October 9, 2009 @ 9:40 am | by John Collins

   

  If you are a bit bemused at all the hype around Twitter, which is understandable given that despite its $1 billion valuation it still doesn’t have a revenue model, be very afraid. One company that probably is quite pleased with the web darling of 2009 is our own Jacob Fruitfield Group. Announcing on its blog this morning that it will soon be available in French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS) the San Francisco company illustrated the post with a picture of that perennial Irish biscuit the Fig Roll. I wonder has the Jacobs web master figured out what they owe the spike in web traffic to?

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• Clocking off

  October 7, 2009 @ 6:26 pm | by Laura Slattery

  The smugly delivered policy announcements at the Conservative party conference in Britain this week were a typical barrage of odious: threats to cut sick benefits, promises to stop rolling out speed cameras, that kind of thing. But there was one proposal that is just inevitable, regardless of the political tide, economic winds or island you live on: the raising of retirement age.

  My scheduled retirement date is 2044. I know because every year I get a slip of paper telling me that’s when the misery/joy/frustration/satisfaction will cease. But I won’t be planning the party just yet. Arguably, out of all the numbers that are on that A4 annual pension update, this is the one that is the most meaningless.

  As one of the youngest members of the Irish Times group pension scheme, if I wind up spending a significant proportion of my working life contributing to this particular pension pot, I could be last in line to collect. This prevents me from thinking about the pension as anything other than a theoretical concept - nice idea, but really? Contributions seem increasingly like Dublin Bus “change” receipts: they all add up, but seem destined never to be cashed in. My relative youth also gives me a financial interest in the early death of my colleagues, which is unfortunate.

  Life expectancy is increasing. Only last week a study in the Lancet reported that more than half of babies born in the developed world since 2000 can expect to live to 100 if current life expectancy trends continue. Better still, Danish ageing experts found that the trend for increasingly longer lives since 1840 “does not suggest a looming limit to human lifespan”. So assuming the improved mortality rates are accompanied by better health, at some point in the future the idea that everybody clocks off at 65 will seem bizarre as well as financially illogical (and not just because in Ireland we’ll have turned the National Pensions Reserve Fund into a child’s piggy bank by then).

  But how will this upward shifting of the traditional retirement age, or indeed the abolition of the very idea of a retirement age, be managed? If you’re already planning how to blow what’s left of your pension lump sum, you’re quite likely to want to punch anyone who suggests that you clock in for another year or five. But it should be politically very easy for governments (and employers) to change the rules for younger workers. If you’re several decades away from your bus pass years, retirement age is just an abstract number: 65 or 67, who cares when you’re 25. It’s impossible to properly conceive just how irritated you’ll be getting out of bed that far into the future.

  The Death’s Time Facebook application tells me I will die on November 10th, 2027, aged 48. Cause of death: decapitation by a utility truck while sticking my head out of a limo. It seems unlikely, but not much more so than the idea that the centenarians of the 22nd century, today’s crawlers and gurglers, will get to spend longer out of the workplace than in it.

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• The heat is on, the time is right for Rio

  October 5, 2009 @ 10:30 am | by Laura Slattery

  After months of intensive lobbying, fractious debate and last-minute appeals from the political big guns, the good people finally voted on Friday with a clear 2-1 result. That’s right, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) plumped for Rio de Janeiro as the hosts of the 2016 Olympics, knocking Madrid, Tokyo and bookies’ favourites Chicago out of the water. (For the post-Lisbon fallout there are other blogs.)

  The Rio massive, led by national football icon Pele, was certainly happy with its victory over the Spanish capital in the final round. But the history of Olympic host cities suggests that the euphoria will subside sometime over the next seven years as the bills for all that stadium security, urine test analysis and ticker tape closing ceremonies start to mount up like hurdling steeplechasers. So what’s the damage?

  Rio is ploughing $11.1 billion (€8 billion) into the staging of the games (which sounds cheap in Nama currency), with the Brazilian government having already stumped up for 70 per cent of that.  As always, there’s a lot of housekeeping to sort out too. The shock of the IOC’s imperviousness to the Obama oratorical magic barely had time to fade before Bloomberg was busy speculating about the mammoth task facing Brazilian President Lula in ridding Rio of violent crime, improving its transit system, renovating its “crumbling” airport and doubling its hotel space. Not to worry, it’s got the 2014 World Cup for a warm up.

  Hosting the Olympics is a notoriously high-risk financial game: the smokers of Montreal (1976) spent 30 years paying off the cost of its Olympic stadium through a special tobacco tax. But while the “debit” column may be scary, the infrastructure legacy can also be immense. By the time 2012 comes around, London’s transport map will have been redrawn several times to include the extra tube stations and overground lines constructed for the Olympics, while Rio is devising special Olympic routes linking four separate districts of the city in which its Games will be held. 

  According to a Sao Paulo business school study, spin-off revenues from the Games will inject more than $50 billion into the Brazilian economy and create 120,000 jobs a year. Meanwhile, the Games and the World Cup will each add 1 percentage point to annual economic growth, its finance minister, Guido Mantega, said this weekend at a meeting of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies: “It won’t be long before we’re growing too much.” Okay, there’s no need to rub it in.

  The Olympics is an economic stimulus package wrapped in lycra and sweat. But you only have to look at how sponsorship revenues for London 2012 wobbled in the wake of global recession to know that seven years is a long time to be counting your cents. Brazil won’t find out whether or not its Olympics will be profitable until long after the athletes’ village has been converted into condos and the gold medallists have departed the Copacobana for Warsaw, Delhi or whichever emerging economy is passed the torch for the 2020 Games.

  The prospect of the first South American Games is definitely cheering news though. I’ve never been to Brazil, and I reckon there’s still time to take up fencing between now and then. Failing that, some crowd called the International Property Directive, hot off the starting blocks, has already emailed me to enquire if, based on Rio’s victory, I would be interested in availing of their on-the-ground expertise for “investments from single units to entire resorts and land banks” in the shadow of Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain. Hmmm. What a pity my credit cards are maxed out right now. Because otherwise…

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• These aren’t just any jobs…

  October 1, 2009 @ 7:00 pm | by Laura Slattery

   

  The long, wide queue snaking around onto O’Connell Street from Findlater Place was a curious sight from the top deck of the bus this morning. My first thought: Which reality television show was holding auditions in Dublin? But they weren’t fame-seekers, they were highly qualified job-seekers. Clutching their CVs and references, they were lining up to stake their claim on one of 588 temporary part-time jobs in Marks & Spencer’s 20 Irish stores at walk-in interviews being held in the Academy Plaza hotel. First come, first served applies to job candidates as well as employees at M&S, apparently.

  The jobs may just be for the bumper Christmas period, but for many workers turned dole collectors, the 16-hour a week positions could mean the financial lifeline that gets them through to the new year. What M&S’s seasonal recruitment drive - which amounts to 20,000 part-time jobs across the UK and Ireland - doesn’t signal, however, is the end of the retail slump.

  Christmas, after all, is supposed to be that bit busy on the tills. If M&S wasn’t planning ahead this way, murmurs would start that its 30th year in Ireland was its last. And, of course, the good thing about hiring temporary workers, from any employers’ point of view, is that it’s easy come, easy go. If there is no queue of customers to match the queue of job applicants, then the early birds who secured a job today will find themselves out in the cold again.

  But in terms of offering stable employment, M&S is still likely to be a better prospect than many retailers. Its latest sales update showed that like-for-like sales in its UK stores declined 0.5 per cent in the third quarter: negative, but barely, and a marked improvement on previous quarters. Its performance is often viewed as a bellwether for the British retail sector and wider economy. It hasn’t got the same scale or reputation here, but executive chairman Stuart Rose’s comment that “people feel better about life” does mirror the mood that emerged from today’s KBC Ireland / ESRI consumer sentiment index: things still seem bad to the average consumer, but they don’t seem quite as horrendous as they did before. (Until you’re the one to lose your job.)

  Whether it’s the popular “dine in” foodhall offers, its cute 150-year anniversary vintage products or the launch of yet more womenswear ranges (the 30-plus range Indigo and the 45-plus range Portfolio), M&S always seems to have some new campaign up its moderately stylish sleeve. With often disgruntled shareholders to answer to, it has to look like its doing something to rake in the sales. Its insistence on stocking lamb flown in from New Zealand hasn’t gone down terribly well with Irish farmers in recent years, but in its favour, M&S has also been noticeably fairer about passing on the weaker sterling to euro customers than many other British retailers.

  Rose has warned of a “tough” 2010, with continued “pressure on pockets”. The desperate jobseekers who arrived too late to snatch an M&S job today know all about that. These weren’t just any jobs. If you’re unemployed, they’re pretty much the only jobs in town.

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