Planet Business

The week reviewed in brief

THE NUMBERS

$173 billion

- amount of taxpayer-funded aid injected by the US government to rescue insurance company AIG.

$165 million

- amount that has been paid out in bonuses to AIG's financial products team, whose decisions were largely responsible for AIG needing to be rescued in the first place.

45

- percentage pay cut taken by AIB chief executive Eugene Sheehy last year, who took home €1.15 million in his 2008 pay packet, it was revealed this week.

1,603

- percentage increase in bad debts at AIB in 2008 due to poorly judged loans made to Irish developers.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK  "Just a side note, you know, Guinness tastes very different in Ireland. It is much better. You guys are keeping the good stuff for yourself. It could start a trade dispute."- Barack Obama blows cover on a singularly Irish form of protectionism.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK 2 "Boy, you thought St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. Let's send him down to Wall Street. That's what we should do."- American chatshow host Jay Leno has a cunning plan.

GOOD WEEK

Power-tweeting

The Twittersphere has taken on a competitive edge with word that it is not just Stephen Fry, the lovely Lily Allen, right, and dedicated media Twitter correspondents who are logging in to Tweet to their followers in 140 characters or less. An estimated 700,000 small businesses in Britain are now logging into the free site to market to customers, monitor suppliers and, ingeniously, sign up to their competitors' Tweets.

IBM

Big Blue is on the verge of taking over Sun Microsystems in a $6.5 billion (€4.7 billion) deal - the largest in IBM's history. The alliance between the computer hardware giant and Sun, the creator of the Java internet programming language, would create an R&D colossus and bring together two key backers of the open-source Linux operating system - therefore uniting two allies in the battle against Microsoft.

BAD WEEK

OK! Magazine

Even if you believe that tut-tutting at Jade Goody's circulation-boosting cancer publicity blitz is pure snobbery, you may balk at OK! Magazine's latest wheeze: publishing a Jade Goody, right, "official tribute issue 1981-2009" claiming to feature her "last words" and boasting the strapline "in loving memory" - while she is still alive. The UK Press Complaints Commission has received more than a dozen complaints on the grounds of accuracy.

Coca-Cola

China has rejected Coca-Cola's plan to snap up juice maker Huiyuan Juice for $2.4 billion (€1.8 billion), which would have been the largest ever buyout of a Chinese company by a foreign rival. The official reason for the "thanks, but no thanks" was that it would have been bad for competition. Then again, perhaps the Chinese ministry of commerce had the misfortune to hear the aurally painful new Diet Coke ad featuring Duffy and said enough was enough.