Following the move into the formal takeover period Cadbury chairman Roger Carr wasted no time in dismissing the Kraft bid as derisory and labelling its American suitor as a “low growth conglomerate”. There is of course a slight undertone of snobbery here. On its corporate website 185-year old Cadbury trumpets its Quaker roots, its commitment to fair-trade and the wholesome milk that goes into its flagship chocolate product. Clearly the approaches from the maker of Capri Sun, Handi Snacks and Kraft Easy Mac Cups (don’t ask) are unwanted.

Watching one of those Saturday night top 50 shows on Channel 4 I was reminded just how short the corporate memory at Cadbury must be. Anyone remember Cadbury’s Smash from the 70s?

Cadbury and Kraft may have more in common than one side wants to admit. This is going to be a long and interesting battle.

Back in 19th century, credit reports were a lot more interesting to read, as the historian Scott A. Sandage recounts in his 2005 book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. “Not worth the powder to kill him,” read one early report on an Alabama trader. Meanwhile, a Philadelphia business owner is deemed “rather too magnificent in his plans and projects” and later becomes a lowly clerk , while another Manhattan entrepreneur is branded “as tight as the bark on a black gum”.

According to Sandage, few cases were as clear-cut as this 1862 report: “The whole lot of Weatherbys are Bad Eggs.” Bad egg was newly hatched American slang in 1862, “typical of the commodity talk that made credit reports both understandable and concise”. Because goods were delivered by railroads, telling fresh from stale was not easy. ”A bad egg was a market commodity that turned out to be worthless, an apt metaphor for gauging a trader’s current and future value,” he writes.

Eventually, all-purpose epithets like “good for nothing” were replaced with something akin to the current system. “Rated A no. I”, derived from naval and insurance classifications, meant the person was good for unlimited credit. But these “big red books” still loved nothing more than swipes and quips. The owner of the Black Bear Tavern in Cincinnati, according to an 1854 credit report, “has prop[erty], ought to make money, but is dissipated, vacillating, wasteful at times…” Some men were too fickle to be bankable commodities.

A century and a half before the likes of Fitch, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s were busy giving ”AAA” ratings to the toxic confections that were securitised subprime mortgages, their predecessors were never shy about giving potential business failures the “worthless” tag: “worthless and always will be”, “worthless and contemptible”, “worthless cuss, never was worth anything” and “worthless but still here” were among the choice insults. If only Fitch’s earlier decrees about the creditworthiness of the Irish economy had reflected this 1856 entry from Georgia: “in good credit now but hard times might blow them over.”

Sandage’s book notes that the early credit ledgers introduced “new vocabularies” of success and failure to railroad-era America. “Loser was once a neutral word for anybody who lost property, often by theft or natural disaster,” he says. By acting like moral policemen, the credit ratings agencies changed that. These days, it seems like we’ve come full circle. The rewards-for-failure culture means there are no real losers among the financial services elite. Why bother indulging in a sense of personal shame when you can keep bonuses for executives and lay off junior staff instead?

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More interesting Bank is refusing to do any media interviews on “legal advice” so the media are left to wade through the 81 page “Interim Statement for the 6 months ended 30 September 2009” for details on the bank’s performance.

Most Irish business owners will be interested on the statement’s about the bank’s business lending:

“Gross new lending to SMEs in the first 6 months of our financial year was over €1.5 billion, with overall SME overdraft / working capital facilities / limits available to customers up 18% on 2008 levels. We continue to process over 6,000 credit applications each month with consistently high levels of approvals maintained over the period. We have opened 12,000 business current accounts since April 2009. Bank of Ireland is very much open for business and committed to supporting our customers.”

I have no doubt that if the bank says it has lent  €1.5 billion to businesses it has. But I wonder just what proportion of its lending is in private equity deals overseas. As we reported in August Bank of Ireland was part of a syndicate of banks that supported the €133 million acquisition of German company Kalle by Silverfleet Capital, a buyout firm. A bank spokesperson said each of the banks contributed about €25 million, so that’s a fair chunk of the €125 million.

Given the €3.5 billion in Government support Bank of Ireland has received (not to mention the bank guarantee) taxpayers might expect some more explicit detail and evidence that it is supporting the real Irish economy.

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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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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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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.