Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

THE LIST

OLYMPIC NIGHTMARES:

Official partners such as McDonald’s, Adidas and “proud sponsors of Mums” Procter & Gamble, plus successful ambush marketers such as Paddy Power and Beats by Dr Dre (provider of swimmers’ headphones), are having a good Olympics. But who is not doing quite so well?

1. NBC:Viewing figures for the US broadcast rights-holder are pole-vault high, but the network has suffered brand damage from its failure to show live coverage.

2. Ticketmaster:The London 2012 ticketing site has been a midnight canoe slalom ride of hope, disappointment, renewed flickers of hope, despair, repeat until morning.

3. Clothing retailers:Next chief executive Simon Wolfson says the games are "definitely negative" for central London shops as tourists stay away and everyone else stays in and watches telly.

4. The West End:The phrase "ghost town" has been popping up, as Andrew Lloyd Webber's prediction that 2012 would be a "bloodbath" for theatres looks accurate.

5. Twitter:It lapped its rivals in the race to amass Olympic mentions, but was deemed off-target when it encouraged commercial partner NBC to have a journalist's account suspended.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

LET'S TRADE:

It’s (almost) all smiles here at this meeting of South American leaders. Venezuela, represented by president Hugo Chávez (left), has joined the continent’s Mercosur trading bloc, and is officially celebrating this moment with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Uruguay’s president José Mujica and Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Brazil said oil-rich Venezuela’s entry, to which the suspended Paraguay objects, creates a bloc that “will now extend from the Caribbean to the extreme south of the continent”.

It sounds harmonious butbehind the scenes there is tension between the bloc’s original trade liberalisation bent and the protectionist policies of its members.

Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/ Reuters

GETTING TO KNOW...

WAYNE SWAN

The man named Finance Minister of the Year 2011, Australian treasurer Wayne Swan, is rock’n’roll when it comes to influences on his economic philosophy. Swan, who is also Australia’s deputy prime minister under the Labour government, has named Bruce Springsteen as his hero.

“You can hear Springsteen singing about the shifting foundations of the US economy which the economists took much longer to detect, and which of course everyone is talking about now,” Swan said. “Poor man want to be rich, rich man want to be king, and a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything,” he quoted from Springsteen’s song Badlands, claiming the words had direct relevance to the growing political influence in Australia of mining billionaires Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer. Swan’s opposite number, meanwhile, said Swan wasn’t “born to run” the country.

In numbers:RTÉ spending by genre

€68.3m

Sum spent across RTÉ on news and current affairs in 2011, according to its just-released annual report.

€46.7m

Spending on sports coverage across the group.

€34.7m

Spent on entertainment programming last year.

€12m

Allocated to young people’s programmes.

THE LEXICON

MINI FLASH CRASH

With so much else going wrong in the financial system to keep us awake at night, not everyone will remember the “flash crash” of 2010, when the Dow Jones index plunged 10 per cent in a matter of minutes.

But there was a flash crash flashback this week when 148 stocks trading on the New York Stock Exchange attracted unusually high trading volumes over a 45-minute period on Wednesday, with some enduring volatile swings in their share price.

The NYSE is “reviewing” the incident, now being dubbed a “mini flash crash”, but early reports point the finger at a glitch in a trading algorithm used by the broker Knight Capital.