Planet Business

The week in business

THE NUMBERS

23,400- Number of properties available to rent nationwide on August 1st, according to data from Daft.ie

6,200- Number of properties available to rent nationwide on the same date in 2007.

130 million- Data relating to this number of credit and debt cards was stolen by one Albert Gonzalez and two unnamed Russian co-conspirators, in what is the biggest case of identity theft to date in the US.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Bernie was a release valve, someone I could disappear with for a few hours. Somebody who would say nice things to me and treat me like a lady . . . he opened doors for me, stood when I entered restaurants and was never short of compliments."

- Sheryl Weinstein describes her affair with fraudster Bernard Madoff, as documented in her new tell-all book Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me. Ms Weinstein is a former finance director at an organisation that invested with Madoff. This is one of the clean extracts.

GOOD WEEK

Heathrow

Airport operator BAA and British Airways are installing philosopher Alain de Botton as writer-in-residence at Terminal 5 for a week, where he will be preying on all the "get a room" farewells and tearful journeys past security - a little bit like that Sky One programme Kate Thornton does, except with planeloads of extra pretentiousness.

De Botton, author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Workand The Art of Travel, will be publishing his Heathrow diary in the autumn, an effort BAA/BA hope will add a literary sheen to any hiccups real airport users encounter.

Richard Burrows

From toxic property loans to toxic chemicals, so the former chairman of Bank of Ireland smoothly steps. Burrows is to replace Jan du Plessis as chairman of British American Tobacco (BAT), the world's second-biggest cigarette maker, adding the vendor of Lucky Strike and Dunhill to a non-executive board-sitting portfolio that comprises Danish brewer Carlsberg and pest-control and parcel delivery firm Rentokil Initial. Burrows is reportedly a non-smoker - but then he's probably not big on rat poison either.

BAD WEEK

Tightwad-spendthrift couples

Researchers at three US universities have rated married couples on a "Tightwad-spendthrift" scale based on how people feel about spending money, deciding that opposites do attract when it comes to money. Tightwads who feel "pain" when parting with their cash and live in a permanent state of non-buyer's remorse are only too happy to hook up with happy-go-lucky spendthrifts who, left to their own devices, would turn shopping into a hazardous activity. However, once the initial attraction subsides, couples with polarised attitudes to money management tend to be more miserable than two tightwads or two spendthrifts.

Mortgage borrowers

France and Germany coming out of recession is all very well if it boosts Irish exports, but the other side-effect is that a more booming euro zone economy means the European Central Bank (ECB) will start mooting the possibility of lifting interest rates, meaning pretty much all Irish mortgage borrowers, not just customers of Permanent TSB, will face higher repayments. This week, Adam Posen, the new boy on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, predicted that the ECB would be the first central bank to tighten rates. Soon, we'll all be tightwads.