Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY
Shop talk
These are not good times for music, DVD, games and books retailer HMV, which saw its share price plunge yesterday as it announced a sluggish start to Christmas trading and a bigger-than-expected 6 per cent drop in first-half sales. Worse still, however, have been analyst comments, which were somewhat down tempo.
“These results do little to ease fears that HMV is slowly being consigned to the history books,” opined Keith Bowman, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers. “Furthermore, moves to diversify the product offering smack of desperation, with competition in clothing and electrical products already hugely intense.”
The question: How did Eric Cantonas ‘day of reckoning’ pan out then?
Eric Cantona. 1990s footballer. Part-time philosopher. Kung-fu practitioner. The Frenchman once notoriously explained the actions of paparazzi by declaring “when the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”, an image that applies neatly to the bonus-chasing disciples of the markets.
Lately, he’s been rather less enigmatic, bluntly calling on French citizens to withdraw all of their money from the banks on December 7th.
“It would be a quick, painless blow. No weapons, no blood, nothing at all.”
In a video appeal, Cantona had hoped French people protesting against changes to retirement ages would “go to the bank, withdraw their money and the banks collapse”, describing it as the “real revolution”. His supporters were estimated at 38,000, but his appeal was deplored by French finance minister Christine Lagarde, who noted it was “best if everyone sticks to their own speciality” and not everyone had “the savings he has”. The day turned out to be a quiet one for French banking. Cantona failed to turn up at a bank, while French news agency AFP reported that everything was business as usual. The trawler sails on.
Hard currency
Just when you thought it was safe to leave your cash with the banks again, Gordon Brown has been on to the BBC’s Robert Peston, warning that there must and will be “a high noon” in the euro zone in the new year.
“I sense that, in the first few months of 2011, we will have a major crisis in the euro area,” he said, citing a perfect storm of fiscal deficits, massive banking liabilities in the core as well as peripheral nations, and the failure to complete structural reforms that would allow for a more flexible currency.
The leaders of the euro zone have to seize the initiative from markets and sort it all out “privately behind closed doors”, according to Brown.
Otherwise, countries will be “picked off one by one” and a decade of low growth and high unemployment will follow.
Stautus updates
Political football:The ruler of Burma, Than Shwe, considered making a $1 billion bid to buy Manchester United football club in 2008, the WikiLeaks cables have revealed.
Concorde verdict:A decade after the Paris Concorde crash, a court has found Continental Airlines and one of its mechanics guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of 113 people.
Withdrawal symptoms:Jeffrey Kindler, chairman and chief executive of world's biggest drugmaker Pfizer, has unexpectedly resigned, citing a need to "recharge my batteries".
"They're the poison gas of cybersapce"
– John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former Grateful Dead lyricist, on distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. His call to arms for “the first serious infowar” had been adopted by a WikiLeaks-supporter group called Anonymous which is using DDoS attacks as part of “Operation Avenge Assange”.
€68 bn
- sum that Irish banks have repaid to senior bondholders, as their full debt fell due under the two-year blanket guarantee, according to Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan.
