Planet Business

A round-up of news from the world of business

The Numbers

$68 billion

– Amount of emergency bailout money repaid by 10 of America's biggest banks after they were judged to have recovered enough stability to survive without taxpayers' assistance.

$71

Price reached by a barrel of crude oil on Wednesday morning – its highest in seven months.

$67

- Average oil prices per barrel predicted by the US Energy Information Administration for the second half of 2009, up $16 on its previous forecast.

20-€25bn

– Amount that credit rating agency Standard & Poor's reckons that the Irish Government will ultimately spend bailing out the Irish banks/pouring into a black hole.

Quote of the Week

“This will cost us. There’s no free lunch.”

– British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh tells the annual general meeting of the International Air Transport Association in Kuala Lumpur that carbon emissions caps will cost the airline industry $7 billion a year. How many trips to the toilet is that?

GOOD WEEK

E-books

– In a declaration that is sure to warm the hearts of Sony, Apple and Amazon executives (if they have hearts), California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to – there's no way around it – terminate school textbooks in favour of their electronic equivalents.

The erstwhile bodybuilder believes it is "nonsensical and expensive" to look at traditional hard-bound books when information can be read in digital form and kids these days feel as comfortable with electronic devices as he did with pencils and crayons. Heavy schoolbooks do, however, make handy weights for that extra touch of muscle definition, he joked.

Andy Hornby

– From a strategy of expand and implode at the Halifax, to a career flogging Protect and Perfect at Boots, so former HBOS chief executive Andy Hornby seamlessly moves. Being partly responsible for one of the greatest financial disasters in British financial history has proved no impediment to Mr Hornby (42), who takes the chief executive job at Alliance Boots in the comforting knowledge that its chairman admires his "wealth of retail and marketing experience".

Presumably a lifetime supply of Boots’s celebrated anti-ageing skin cream – to wipe away those telltale signs of forced apologies to parliament committees – is part of the deal.

BAD WEEK

Exporters

– Gordon Brown, alleged "master of the dark arts", will single-handedly ruin profit margins for Irish exporters over the coming months by selfishly clinging on to the keys of number 10, was the very loose gist of a gaggle of notes from stockbroker analysts. Commerzbank claimed that sterling will remain weak as long as Brown remains "in office but not in power", as the saying goes, with the euro strengthening to 90 pence or more. Conversely, BNP Paribas told investors that were Brown to fall on his sword or call an early general election, the pound would get at least a temporary boost.

'The Apprentice'

– Not only is the next series of the BBC1 show faced with the loss to academia of Margaret Mountford – the British answer to Jackie Lavin, so to speak – but candidates on next year's show will effectively be auditioning for a public policy wonk instead of a business impresario as, if/when Sir/Lord Alan Sugar becomes an enterprise tsar for the British government, he will have to step back from the day-to-day running of his property/electronics/digital signage empire and spend more time delivering withering soundbites on Sky News. So thank God he's got Yasmina, Simon and Lee to hold the fort.