Planet business

By LAURA SLATTERY

Shop talk

Hot on the designer heels of Brown Thomas, which last week issued a press release declaring it was seeking 150 workers for seasonal retail duties, catalogue purveyor Argos is the latest retail chain to reassure us the world hasn’t gone completely haywire.

Irish consumers, as depressed as they are by the vagaries of hitherto irrelevant bond markets, are still planning to buy a few things between now and 2011.

Argos’s temporary worker tally is an impressive 700, which it will need to provide the additional service required at its 39 stores in Ireland. Last year, the snaking queues for seasonal retail jobs were longer than some customer queues the Saturday before Christmas. This year looks set to be a repeat.

Hard currency

Our friends in the International Monetary Fund have warned that an “international currency war” – a phrase coined by Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega – could threaten the global recovery.

This war, which will be fought through the cunning use of currency depreciation as a policy weapon, leaves exporters trading in appreciating currencies such as the Australian dollar in a bit of a pickle. This week, the Australian dollar hit a 27-year high against the US dollar, as the former was boosted by employment figures and the latter dragged down by speculation the Federal Reserve will expand its stimulus measures.

The Australian dollar is now expected to reach parity with the US dollar, which will likely prompt an influx of tourism to Hawaiian shores.

" Prison is unacceptable for a man who didn't make a penny"- Olivier Metzner, lawyer for rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel, describes his sentence as "unreasonable". Kerviel said he was "crushed".

STATUS UPDATE:

Facebook on screen:The Social Network, the movie based on the tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, topped the US weekend box office but took less cash than expected.

Drug battle:French pharma group Sanofi-Aventis has begun a hostile takeover of US biotech firm Genzyme, which will review the $18.5 billion (€13.3 billion) offer over the next 10 days.

Aston assets:It's often voted the "coolest" brand, but sales of Aston Martin cars are down 30 per cent, prompting its Kuwaiti owners to flog off its assets and rights.

75:percentage of Irish people who say they are prepared to shower less often to save money, according to a survey by shower manufacturer Triton.

The question: is it game over for Microsoft?

“Game over” is overstating it, but it hasn’t been a great year for Microsoft and this time there are no antitrust rulings to blame. Monday was a grim day for the company, with its share price dropping 2.3 per cent. This dragged down both the Dow Jones and Nasdaq 100 index in the US. The spark was a downgrade on the rating given to the stock by analysts at Goldman Sachs, which cited a slow post-recession recovery in PC sales and competition from tablet computers – which do not include Windows software and may even point to a Windows-free future for computing.

No need to panic and go into hibernation just yet, however. Microsoft is still the world’s largest software maker and powers more than 90 per cent of the world’s computers. Founder Bill Gates is still the richest man in America, according to the last edition of the “my billions are bigger than your billions” Forbes rankings.

And Goldman Sachs’s downgrade was not exactly “sell, sell, sell”, but a shift in its recommendation from “buy” to “neutral”. Analyst Sarah Friar noted that revenues and investor sentiment towards the stock would remain under pressure until it gained a firmer foothold in the crucial smartphone and tablet markets dominated by Apple and Google.

Microsoft will try win over the sceptics with the launch of its Windows Phone 7 software next week, while Windows-based tablets may be available by Christmas, according to chief executive Steve Ballmer. In the shorter term, there’s always the launch of Kinect, its device-free motion-sensing game controller for Xbox, to help it inch towards the next level.