Planet Business

A review of the week by LAURA SLATTERY

THE NUMBERS

1.1 million

– Number of cars recalled by Toyota this week because of potential problems with accelerator pedals on certain models.

7.6 million

– Total number of Toyota vehicles recalled since November, with the company’s strong safety record taking a battering.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

'Look, I am not interested in punishing banks.'

– That's not quite what you said last week, Barack Obama.

GOOD WEEK

Apple

After naming its new tablet computer after a sanitary towel (the iPad already goes by the not-childish-at-all alternative name iTampon), Apple turned its attentions to grander schemes: “World’s first iPhone baby born,” screamed the headlines earlier this week. In a development sure to confuse future retellings of the Garden of Eden story, a couple called Lena and Dudley Bryce have apparently used an iPhone application to help them work out ovulation times – a task hitherto so difficult for the app-free mind to calculate all by itself that the human race was threatened with extinction. Of course, there are thermometers down in Boots that do much the same thing as the iPhone app, but they don’t generate such exciting headlines.

Saab

The Saab brand will live on following a last minute reprieve of sorts as Dutch sports car maker Spyker bought the ailing Swedish company from the offloading General Motors. Spyker, which started life building coaches for the Dutch royal family in the 19th century and only made some 40 boutique cars last year, has now taken on a Saab production line of tens of thousands. However, Saab has been lossmaking since GM bought it in 2000, and it sold less than 40,000 cars last year, down from 95,000 in 2008, prompting sceptical noises about whether Spyker can do anything to win back Saab customers simply by making a planned new redesign “as Saabish as possible”. Perhaps they could target disaffected Toyota buyers?

BAD WEEK

Gordon Brown

The UK may finally have emerged from recession this week with fourth-quarter 2009 growth of 0.1 per cent, but it’s the next set of figures that could cause major political headaches for Labour, as the first estimates are due to be published in the run-up to the deadline by which the UK must hold a general election. So what to do? Wait until after the estimates in hope they’ll show a more convincing recovery and ride the GDP-related goodwill? Or choose an earlier date in the fear that George Soros and others who are forecasting a “double-dip” recession are correct, and thereby avoid the nasty cloud that a return to “negative growth” could cast over voter sentiment at the polling booth?

Church of England

The "rubbish investment of the week" prize, always hotly contested, goes to the Church of England for losing £40 million by buying two large Manhattan redbrick housing complexes that have since collapsed into default following the pricking of the US property bubble. The loss on the investment is the latest in a series of investment ventures gone wrong for the church, but the investment in the complexes, built in the late 1940s and popular among soldiers returning from the second World War, was bad news for its tenants too. Tishman Speyer, the US firm that led the investment, spent years trying to undo rent-control agreements that made living there affordable – not very Christian.