Planet Business

LAURA SLATTERYreviews the week in business

THE NUMBERS

1.3

- percentage by which the global economy will contract this year, according to the doomsayers (and possible saviours) at the International Monetary Fund

€279 million

- value of prize bond sales last year, up 95 per cent as nervous savers flocked to store their cash anywhere that wasn't a bank.

£3.1 billion

- net profit raked in by Tesco in the year to the end of February, although its fledgling US chain Fresh 'n' Easy posted a loss

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

You can grow your way out of recession, you can't cut your way out of it.

- British chancellor Alistair Darling has a distinctly un-Irish approach to cultivating those green shoots.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK II

The lesson of Ireland is that you really, really don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to punish your economy in order to save your banks.

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman

GOOD WEEK

Splitting up

Finding you don't recognise half the people at the office Christmas party? First floor of the company has zero clue what the tenth floor are up to? Why not split in two? Following recent announcements by Citigroup and eBay, Carphone Warehouse this week joined the trend of breaking up by saying that it would float its telecommunications business TalkTalk as a separate company from its retail units, while there are whispers that ITV might separate its broadcasting and content creating operations.

Apple

A Steve Jobs-less Apple unveiled a 15 per cent jump in net profit for its second quarter, as strong sales of iPhones and iPods more than compensated for a slump in the sales of Mac computers. This led Wall Street analysts to conclude that the Californian company's strategy of marketing must-have digital status symbols at premium prices to recession-proof customers was working. Mr Jobs will return from sick leave to head the company in the summer.

BAD WEEK

Payslip envy

Comparing your earnings with others makes you less happy and less satisfied with life, according to research emerging from the Paris School of Economics. (So you're not just depressed because you actually have less money then.) The researchers found that it became more painful for people when they compared their pay packages with those of friends and family members rather than colleagues, while middle-aged people were more likely to brood about their pay than young people.

Australia

It held out for longer than most developed countries, but Australia is likely now to be in recession, the head of the country's central bank has confessed. Its economy, heavily dependent on the production of raw materials and trading links with Asia, was last in decline in the early 1990s, but with one-quarter of negative growth recorded at the end of 2008 and another deemed likely for the first quarter of 2009, it's halfway to official recession status.