Talk of a Zuckerberg run for the White House is fading fast

It seems a long time ago now that Mark Zuckerberg – the Facebook chief executive and golden boy of Silicon Valley – was being talked about as a potential successor to Donald Trump as president of the United States.

It’s an open secret that Zuckerberg has been tempted by the idea after Facebook restructured in 2016 to legally enable him to run for office while still maintaining control of the company.

Then there was his U-turn on religion – an important political constituency in the US – when the former atheist said he believed religion was in fact “very important”. But it looks like he can forget about all that, at least for now.

This week's fall from grace centred on political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users and used it to inform Trump's 2016 election campaign as well as the Brexit referendum and others.

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The scandal knocked more than $60 billion off Facebook’s market value at one point, and cost Zuckerberg himself something in the region of $7.4 billion of his fortune in just two days, with users abandoning the social network in large numbers.

Famously reclusive, Zuckerberg was eventually forced to front up and talk to the media as he attempted to stop the bleeding. He accepted errors had been made, and pledged never to hold information like this back from users in the future, but the damage has been severe.

Germany’s second largest bank, Commerzbank, suspended advertising on Facebook until further notice, following in the steps of Mozilla, which runs the Firefox web browser.

Zuckerberg said he was willing to testify to any US government inquiry, while European Parliament president Antonio Tajani said it would also investigate the matter. It’s a long way back for the company which started out in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dormitory.

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Avoiding that pesky “disorderly cliff edge” exit has been the name of the game since the UK voted to leave the European Union almost two years ago, and, finally, this week, there was some progress on that.

European leaders on Friday backed a transition deal that will effectively keep the UK in the union until the end of 2020, giving negotiators a little more time as they race to untangle Britain from the bloc following decades of integration.

It took just minutes to sign off on the deal at a summit of the European Council in Brussels, which also set out guidelines in terms of the strategy for negotiating a future relationship, covering trade, security and other issues.

It included zero tariffs on goods, reciprocal access to fishing waters and co-operation in defence and foreign affairs. EU lead negotiator Michel Barnier said the EU was “crossing a decisive point in this difficult and extraordinary negotiation”.

Before he gets too carried away, though, there remains the Border issue, which, it was asserted, must be solved before any of this can come to pass. Earlier in the week the UK reaffirmed its commitment to the “backstop” guarantee to avoid a hard Irish border. That being said, London is resisting the proposal which would effectively keep Northern Ireland in the customs union and single market, thereby creating a border in the Irish Sea, unless another solution is found.

The stakes in all this couldn’t be higher, with a new study by the ESRI showing Brexit could cost Irish households up to €1,400 a year as prices rise. Lower-income families will fare worst.

Speaking at an event in Brussels on Wednesday, Barnier acknowledged his work was “not just about regulations and rules – it is about people”. He even delivered a few words in Irish, which must have pleased the DUP no end.

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Geopolitics seems in a state of major flux these days as Trump fuels fears of a global trade war, while Europe, as if it hasn’t got enough on its plate, moves to introduce a new digital tax.

European Council president Donald Tusk warned European leaders that their tax systems were no longer fit for purpose. He said the inability to levy tax where wealth was created was aiding tax avoidance and leaving holes in national finances.

The 3 per cent digital tax would require businesses to pay tax on profits generated in states where they have a significant digital presence even if they are not physically located there.

Some 120-150 companies would be affected, and the tax could raise €5 billion, hitting big players like Facebook, Google and Amazon, which all have operations in the Republic. No surprise then it was denounced as “ill-judged” by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

There’s also the concern it could antagonise Trump, who may see it as a tax grab of US corporate cash. Trump ratcheted up America’s beeline to protectionism as he introduced trade tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese products.

Trump introduced the measures in response to allegations of intellectual property theft by China. Beijing urged him to “pause at the brink of a precipice”, warning it would not sit idly by as Washington started a trade war.

Trump did, however, exempt EU steel and aluminium from previously announced tariffs.

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The holders of €900 million of "split mortgages" with Permanent TSB remain on tenterhooks as the lender tries to reclassify them as performing loans – but bankers this week moved to reassure borrowers even in the event the loans are sold on.

PTSB’s chief executive Jeremy Masding said the evidence does not support the narrative that secondary buyers were managing loans any more aggressively than original banks.

The bank also said it would be impossible to reach ECB targets to reduce its level of bad loans without resorting to loan sales.

Elsewhere, about 80 top executives and managers at AIB stand to benefit from the lender’s plan to establish a deferred annual share scheme, starting in 2019.

Finally, Finance Ireland, the largest non-bank lender in the retail market, is considering entering the mortgage market after its pre-tax profit soared 226 per cent last year to €8.3 million.