Pall hangs over shopping mall

SHEILA O'FLANAGAN PLATFORM:IT TOOK a long time for the powers that be to decide what would finally happen to Stack A in the IFSC. There was talk of a museum, an aquarium, a cultural centre and a theatre but eventually last November it opened, not entirely surprisingly, as a shopping mall.

It is not yet bustling. This is probably because most of its potential clientele are holed up anxiously in their offices waiting for the credit crunch to ease.

The majority of the shops are at the top end in terms of the goods and prices, although, according to one of my ex-colleagues, the pricing of the bespoke shirts seems to reflect the current state of the ISEQ.

The more it falls the more discount is available in store. Even snappy city dressers are having to retrench in the current financial climate.

Stuck away from the mainstream shopping areas, the mall needs something more than discounted shirts and cufflinks to bring in the punters.

A bookie's might help - traders who have lost their confidence might feel better putting a wager on Punchestown instead and revel in the memories of what it was like to get it right.

At the moment, though, they're having to stick with reminiscing about the good times in the coffee and sandwich bars.

CHQ, as the mall is called, has both an Insomnia and a Starbucks in addition to the shirt purveyor (Henry Jermyn), a speciality tea shop, Meadows & Byrne and Environment Furniture.

For the stressed out, or those needing radical face-work, there's Nue Blue Eriu too.

Primarily, though, the mall contains women's clothing shops. The "City" shopping mall is one area where services for women in financial services outstrip those for men and CHQ is no exception.

Strangely, though, the shops seem to concentrate on the social side of a woman's day rather than the work wardrobe of neutral suits and white blouses which may be boring but which are what so many of us wear in the office.

And although the women at the top of their careers might feel the need for the designer items, there are plenty who would love to see Zara or A-Wear within a lunch-time walking distance. (Speaking of walking distance, a shoe shop would be good too, and a hosiery store.)

It was high-end fashion for me this month though, courtesy of one of my ex-employers, NCB, which held a fashion show for its female clients in the lovely setting of the Trinity College dining hall. Conor O'Kelly, the chief executive, echoed my own thoughts when he commented on the number of women who attended.

It was absolutely wonderful to see well over 100 women at a jolly. Back in the bad old days of total male domination, you were lucky to be given the ticket for the football match that nobody else wanted to watch.

And the time that I organised a female-only event (there were about 15 of us), I had to put up with incessant jeering from the guys about our probable day of man-talk and recipe sharing.

As if! (Why do men think that women talk about them all the time? We don't. We might throw in the occasional complaint, but not as a mainstream conversational topic.)

Anyway it's good to see that more and more women are doing well in financial careers, even if the entire sector is as fraught as a deserted shopping mall. The problem within finance right now is that nobody - regardless of what area they specialise in - is confident about when credit will become more freely available again and markets can begin to recover.

It was the suddenness of the crunch that blindsided everyone. One day you could pick up long-term funding on the interbank markets without any real trouble. The next anything longer than overnight was looking like an incredibly risky gamble. No business (as Northern Rock found out) can fund its future on overnight borrowing.

Despite objections from within the financial community, it is almost inevitable that the authorities will bring in new regulations to save the bankers from themselves.

(The bankers are afraid that regulation will hamper future growth potential. But if they hadn't broken the cardinal rule by lending to people who couldn't pay them back, we wouldn't be in this mess. So what do they expect!)

Goldman Sachs recently estimated the cost of the financial meltdown at $1.2 trillion while the IMF has said that the world economy will slow to growth of 3.7 per cent in 2008 and 2009.

It doesn't look like there will be big bonuses in the sector this year. Not great for the bankers. Not great for the shopping malls either."The bankers are afraid that regulation will hamper future growth potential. But if they hadn't broken the cardinal rule by lending to people who couldn't pay them back, we wouldn't be in this mess