PLANET BUSINESS

Laura Slatteryperuses the week in business

THE NUMBERS

€16,725

- The cost of buying your "true love" the gifts listed in the song The 12 Days of Christmas this year, according to American investment firm PNC Wealth Management. The price tag is up 8 per cent on last year, due to a spike in the cost of seven swans-a-swimming.

£1 million

- Estimated cost to UK bookmakers if there is a White Christmas, as freezing temperatures send festive punters scuttling to place their bets.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"If you shop at home this Christmas, and shop a little bit more this Christmas and if you recognise that money is going to help educate your children and care for people in hospitals and pay for our medical expenses, which the State has to pay for, I think you'll realise that it is important to shop at home."

- Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan tells Morning Ireland listeners that Christmas is not just, well, for Christmas.

GOOD WEEK

Irish tourism

Former C&C chairman and Quinnsworth boss Maurice Pratt is to spearhead a new Tourism Renewal Group that will aim to boost (or at least keep) the tourists coming to kiss the Blarney Stone and wallow in Guinness - although with dazed foreign holidaymakers no longer having to magically locate a €1 coin to work the trolleys at Dublin airport as soon as they touch down on Irish soil, much has already been improved .

The euro

Such is the extent of the financial crisis that EU members who once spurned the single currency are now looking at the euro in a new light, with Iceland, Poland and even Denmark, which has rejected it twice in the past, now limbering up to get in the zone. Even British business secretary Peter Mandelson was forced to counter speculation the UK was thinking about ditching the pound.

BAD WEEK

The Irish economy

After exchequer returns data that showed the public finances to be in a state variously described as "calamitous" (Richard Bruton), "ruinous" (Joan Burton) and "poor" (Brian Lenihan), things went from bad to worse to full-on econaclyptic with the release of Live Register data showing the biggest monthly percentage spike in the number of unemployment claimants since January 1975.

India

Being the outsourcing centre of the world doesn't make a country entirely recession-proof, India is finding out, as the high-tech companies that set up low-cost front office and back office operations in the country have now begun to send word via their western head offices that thousands of call centre operators, payment processors and software programmes must now be laid off.