PLANET BUSINESS

A sideways glance at this week in the world of business.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"It'll make more money for us" - With these simple, honest words, Mark Owen-Lloyd, head of power trading at energy giant E.On, does a Ratner on it, as he jokes about the implications of a "worst-case scenario" for persistently high gas and oil prices on a day when the British government was busy launching all kinds of fuel-poverty initiatives.

THE NUMBERS

$7.1 billion

Cost of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland, which began firing protons this week without creating any black holes.

1 Million

The number of broadband subscriptions in Ireland, "a huge achievement", according to Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan - almost as amazing as watching an entire web video without it seizing up once.

$24 million

Combined pay-off for ousted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac chief executives Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron. Who knows how much they would have pocketed if the two lenders hadn't had combined losses of $14 billion in the last four quarters?

9

The number of months after which Google will dump users' search data, halving the storage time after an EU data privacy group said it had "insufficiently explained" why it was storing personal data. But does Google need to explain anything anymore?

GOOD WEEK

JK Rowling

The Harry Potterauthor has vanquished her latest opponent: number-one fan Steven Vander Ark, whose Harry Potter Lexiconshe tearfully denounced as "the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work".

A New York court has this week agreed and banned publication of the book, despite the fact that its contents had previously featured (to no objection) on a popular fansite, which Rowling herself had admitted using as a fact-checking resource.

The Enron lawyers

The legal team that helped Enron investors recover their losses will earn $688 million (€487 million) in legal fees - the biggest payday in US legal history. Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins (so there were at least five of them) spent 280,000 hours preparing for trial and agreeing settlements with banks including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Lehman Brothers. That's an invoice for €1,740 per hour.

BAD WEEK

Argos

The Argos catalogue is no longer quite the blockbuster must-read it was, with sales (excluding new stores) at the retailer sinking 6 per cent over the summer. Parent company Home Retail Group blamed the "difficult consumer environment", as shoppers stopped flicking through laminated pages of satnavs and jewellery. Coming soon: buy your own stock of souvenir Argos pens, now on special offer.

London Stock Exchange

The software glitch that froze trading screens in London on Monday gave new meaning to the phrase "bad market timing". Traders who wanted to buy and sell in the post Fannie-Freddie rally would have had to get up pretty early in the morning, as by 8.45am the system had decided that all that frantic activity was just too much for a Monday morning and it deserved a well-earned break. Oops.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK 2

"We are on the right track to put these last two quarters behind us." - Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld hopes to forget his annus horribilis, but investors who have seen the value of their shares fall 94 per cent from last year's peak may not find it as easy to move on.