Planet business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

Shop talk

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but US-owned bookseller Borders is to close 200 of its 642 stores after it filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming declining sales and a fast- mutating book market. If the story sounds similar, it's because Borders' UK company went into administration in 2009.

This week, Borders Group president Mike Edwards, admitted it simply doesn't have the capital to be a viable competitor. The advent of e-books is choking 40-year-old Borders, Waterstone's and all the other struggling chains and independent stores. In a world where Amazon sells more digital books than it does physical ones, the Borders business model of owning hundreds of "superstores" stuffed with paperbacks and – more disastrously – CDs and DVDs was unlikely to have a happy ending.

Commodity watch

Demand for gold soared to a 10-year high last year, a report by the World Gold Council has confirmed, citing demand from what is, as of this week, the world's second-largest economy, China. Concerns about inflation pressures and the poor performance of alternative investments made the gold dazzle for Chinese investors, while demand for gold jewellery in China and India reached record highs and grew 17 per cent overall on the previous year.

The world's central banks have also become net purchasers of gold for the first time in two decades as they diversified their reserves. But there were no precious metal bargains on offer: gold prices also hit record highs in 2010.

'They had to know . . . but the attitude was sort of, if you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know'

Convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff says banks and hedge funds took a "hear no evil, see no evil" approach to his giant Ponzi scheme

66

- The percentage of children who never repay loans to the Bank of Mum and Dad, according to a poll by UK finance company MyVoucherCodes.

Status update

Bundesbank boss:Angela Merkel has appointed her aide Jens Weidmann to head up the German central bank. He is a former student of Axel Weber, who resigned last week.

Royal turn-off: An internal e-mail at tourist authority Visit Britain warns of evidence that visitors will steer clear of the UK around the April 29th wedding of William and Kate.

Electronics exploitation:Among the abuses found at companies that supply components for its products, Apple has found that 49 workers were "hired before reaching the legal age".

Why are politicians itching to scrap the licence fee?

Dublin South Green Party candidate Eamon Ryan has declared that if his party is in government next time, it would “abolish the television licence fee as a funding mechanism for the public sector component of RTÉ”.

Ryan’s statement hinted at the evolution rather than destruction of the licence fee, mooting “some small charge on the volume of data”, or a kind of bandwidth tax.

This would be similar, but not identical, to Fine Gael’s manifesto pledge to replace the licence fee with a “household- based public broadcasting charge”, which would be levied on all households and businesses regardless of how they access public service content such as RTÉ news and current affairs (plus a range of ratings-unfriendly but culturally important programming that wouldn’t exist were it not for the licence fee).

Of course, Ryan was Minister for Communications in the outgoing Government. Why is he only now talking tough on the licence fee?

Abolishing the fee is undoubtedly a voter-friendly soundbite but it is also true that the trend toward online consumption of public service content has accelerated since 2007, leaving the licence fee looking antiquated. Collection costs – €12 million to generate €200 million – have also attracted negative attention during the cost-cutting frenzy.

Ryan, like the Labour Party, does not appear to object to the funding of RTÉ per se, just the mechanism. Fine Gael, on the other hand, has proposed increasing the amount of the fee or charge that is held back from RTÉ and put into the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s fund for independent broadcasters, from 7 per cent to 15 per cent.