Pay day

PLANET BUSINESS:"Qantas chief pay" was one of the Sydney Morning Herald's"hot topics" online this week, with the story accompanied by a cartoon of an airline executive explaining how "we've tied the CEO's pay packet to the altitude of the airplanes".

Qantas’s chief executive since 2008, Dubliner Alan Joyce saw his salary grow from A$2.92 million (€2.2 million) to A$5 million (€3.8 million) last year, making him one of the highest-paid airline executives in the world. News of his pay day is proving controversial in Australia because it comes mere weeks after he flagged the need to axe 1,000 jobs at the airline.

STATUS UPDATE

Fortress exit: News International is to sell the Wapping site it made synonymous with the flight of the newspaper industry from Fleet Street after it outmanoeuvred print unions.

Lucky dip: The disparate worlds of gambling and equity investment have united as Spain's national lottery, including the famous El Gordo(The Fat One), prepares to float.

Motor tiff: "Volkswagen is not talking to us. We have no plans to talk to them," Suzuki chairman Osamu Suzuki has told Bloomberg in the latest chapter of their soured alliance.

"They could at least have given a signal . . . and allow for the agencies to look around to see what can be done"

Taoiseach Enda Kenny records his displeasure with Talk Talk, after the shock loss of 575 jobs in Waterford.

THE QUESTION

Will the European Central Bank reverse its recent interest rate hikes?

The governing council of the European Central Bank met in Frankfurt yesterday for its monthly meeting on monetary policy, which essentially boils down to the thorny perennial of what to do with interest rates in light of recent inflation trends in Europe.

Having raised rates twice this year, only to see the euro-zone economy lurch from bailout to bailout over the summer, ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet has now signalled that the current cycle of interest rate hikes is at an end.

But will he and his fellow council members reverse the two quarter-point hikes?

Trichet was giving little away yesterday, merely noting that price risks were now “broadly balanced”.

Seasoned ECB-watchers have declared that holding firm with a base rate of 1.5 per cent will be as good as it gets. “It would take a full-blown recession for the ECB to really reverse course,” Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg bank, told Bloomberg. “Having just raised interest rates, it would be very, very embarrassing to say sorry, we apparently made a mistake.”

Hard currency

In a rare “crunch week” for the euro, enter the Swiss. In a tactic described as “the single largest foreign exchange move I have ever seen” by World First chief economist Jeremy Cook, the Swiss National Bank stunned investors by setting an exchange rate cap on the soaring franc, pegging it to the euro.

Warning of an “acute threat to the Swiss economy”, the SNB is trying to curtail the economic damage caused by prohibitively expensive exports of such Swiss classics as luxury watches and pharmaceuticals. “This dwarfs moves seen post-Lehman Brothers, 7/7 and other major geopolitical events in the past decade,” said Cook.

45,000

Number of feet reached by a spacecraft financed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezosthrough his space company Blue Origin before it crashed during a test flight over Texas.