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Monday, 14 January 2008 |
The Taittinger family has regained control of the champagne
house bearing its name, after an 18-month battle prompted
by the decision of the US venture capital company Starwood
to sell its stake.
Various foreign companies expressed an interest, notably
the Belgian billionaire Albert Frère and the Indian drinks
conglomerate United Brewers, but it was Crédit Agricole
Nord-Est which bought the stake.
It has now agreed to a restructuring which, with other
‘friendly’ shareholders like the Peugeot family, will allow
the Taittingers to become majority shareholders again.
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Monday, 14 January 2008 |
The flooding of the the inter-bank
credit market on December 18 by
the European Central Bank with
more than €500 billion at a special low
interest rate reveals the deep worry about
banks’ finances. An earlier attempt to
restore confidence by the world’s five
leading central bankers’ provision of
US$122 billion of loan funds failed.
These are unprecedented efforts to
reboot inter-bank lending which is
currently more or less frozen.
Twin fears are panicking the bankers.
The bonds backed by mortgage loans
they hold themselves may have to be
down-valued so they need to keep cash
to plug the hole in their balance sheets.
Knowing what they know about
themselves, they are even less keen to
lend their own cash, if they have any, to
other banks, who have the same
problems or worse.
The mainstream media however do
not yet seem to have picked up on their
radars two alarming elements in this
saga, which fully justified Nicolas
Sarkozy in his longstanding campaign
against what he calls the “speculation
economy”.
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Monday, 14 January 2008 |
The British government has
finally caved in and allocated £2.9
billion to compensate 129,000
members of bankrupt final salary
pension schemes.
It took five years to convince the
government that something must be
done. It seems that the evident injustice
in protecting Northern Rock investors
while ignoring pensioners was too much
for the government in the face of Gordon
Brown’s recent fall in popularity.
Pensioners who worked for a
lifetime with companies – and often
stayed with them because of the pension
arrangements – found themselves
getting derisory retirement payments,
sometimes 10 times less than they had
been promised, because the
companies went bankrupt.
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Monday, 14 January 2008 |
How many environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb must really want to change.
As you sit in your newly smokefree
café, take a look through the
clean, clear air at the lighting, and
remember that on New Year’s Day of
1880 Thomas Edison lit up his street
with 40 incandescent light bulbs. And
now they are to come crashing to the
ground as the European agreement to
phase them out by 2010 starts to take
force.
So what’s new since we wrote about
light bulbs in August last year? The most
obvious change is that the replacement
for the swinging naked bulb in grim
movies looks almost certain to be the
CFL (compact fluorescent lamp), the
miniature of the coiled tube in those long
overhead lights in workshops and
offices.
Incandescent bulbs are major
consumers of energy; they have a short
life compared to other bulbs; and their
cost over time is greater. That, at least, is
one way of looking at it.
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Monday, 14 January 2008 |
The end of 2007 was marked by a number of significant discussions at international, European and national level. Are we going somewhere fast or not? wonders Lindsay Woodster.
The IUCN conference in Bali
finished in mid-December, after
acrimonious and emotional
discussions caused mainly by an
eleventh-hour intervention into the
agreement by the United States. The US
objected to the proposal, being backed
by the EU and China, that countries
should sign up to reducing emissions of
greenhouse gases by a compulsory
amount by a compulsory date.
Nobel Prize-winning campaigner Al
Gore hit the news immediately, as he
deplored: “It is my own country which is
principally responsible for obstructing
our progress here.”
Tears on the podium, extensions of
discussion time, booing of the US
speaker and, amazingly, a final
agreement that represented a consensus
of the 190 nations present…
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