Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

53 -The percentage of professional employers who expect their companies will be paying year-end bonuses, according to a survey by Morgan McKinley.

Difficult choices are never easy –An actual sentence spoken in the Dáil this week by Taoiseach Enda Kenny

THE QUESTION

Just who is Michael O'Leary?

According to a speaker biography that appeared the website of the European Commission’s Innovation Convention 2011, Michael O’Leary has been chief executive of Ryanair since 1993. It continues: “Born in a stable in 1961, he was a boy genius, who excelled both academically and at sports. Having represented Ireland internationally at bog snorkelling and flower arranging, he graduated from Trinity College in Dublin as soon as they could get rid of him. He then became another boring KPMG accountant until divine inspiration sentenced to him to a life of penal servitude in the airline business.”

Some commercial box-ticking later, the biography concludes: “It is widely known that women find him irresistible.”

Indeed, who could possibly turn down a man proficient at bog snorkelling?

STATUS UPDATE:

Campaigning speech:The US economy has reached "a make-or-break moment for the middle class" – or so President Barack Obama told a Kansas audience in a spot of early electioneering.

Revenue sucking: Billionaire inventor James Dyson has expressed his unhappiness that Chinese copycat manufacturers of his eponymous vacuum cleaner are, well, cleaning up.

Dictionary corner: 'The Lower 99' 

The "Lower 99" is the phrase used by The Big Shortauthor Michael Lewis in a satirical column for news wire Bloomberg written in the voice of the strategy committee of "the Upper Ones" – his name for the 1 per cent of people estimated by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, among others, to have their clutches on 40 per cent of US wealth (hence the "we are the 99" per cent slogan adopted by the Occupy movement). Lewis's cutting piece laments that the Lower 99 lack leadership, because "anyone with the ability to organise large numbers of unsuccessful people has been diverted into Wall Street jobs".