Business and Finance News
Economist Intelligence Unit launches tool to empower exporters
Market Explorer is claimed to be a unique online tool that allows companies focused on market scanning and forecasting to immediately see which countries and cities offer the greatest opportunities for their products and services, now and in the future.
Decline in China’s industrial imports not offset by rising services
Rising growth in China’s services sector doesn’t generate enough demand for foreign goods to offset the decline from a slowing industrial sector, according to research published Monday by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.
Pfizer: World’s new giant drugs firm to be Irish for tax savings
Pfizer & Tax: Pfizer, the US drugs giant, which is one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms, is to become Irish for tax purposes and will be Ireland’s biggest company — dwarfing the value of Irish companies such as CRH and Ryanair. Ireland’s national accounts will be further distorted by companies that are mainly run from the US but hold board meetings in Dublin.
Nordics tops for financial literacy; Ireland lags UK, Germany
In what is claimed as one of the most extensive measurements of global financial literacy to date, the Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services Global Financial Literacy Survey (S&P Global FinLit Survey) released this week finds that two-thirds of ad…
Angela Merkel: Ten years as chancellor at a time of peril
On Sunday (22 Nov) Angela Merkel will be chancellor of Germany for ten years and until this year her governing style has been viewed as risk averse but for the first time, her bold move in early September to open Germany’s borders to war refugees, is s…
Irish Legal Services Reform: Kenny & Burton hoist the white flag
Five years to the month after the Irish Government made a commitment in the 2010 international bailout agreement to introduce legal services reforms, and 25 years after the Fair Trade Commission recommended the ending of the ban on direct access by the public to barristers, Frances Fitzgerald, justice minister, said Wednesday: “This Government is delivering on long-overdue reforms”— this claim is “an oeconomy of truth” as Edmund Burke wrote of a contemporary issue in 1796 (the usage of oeconomy was later overtaken by the word economy). In the vernacular it is a lie as the minister has produced the feeble excuse for the non-reform that Enda Kenny, taoiseach, desired and which is bizarrely supported by his deputy, Joan Burton, who is also the Labour Party leader.
Jobs in Irish exporting firms down 30,000 since Q2 2008
Jobs in Irish exporting firms at the end of September 2015 were down 30,000 compared with the second quarter (Q2) of 2008, according to the latest quarterly employment data published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Tuesday.
Extremists in Europe & US see gain from barring refugees
Right-wing political extremists in Europe and the US are targeting Syrian war refugees following last Friday’s terrorists attacks in Paris. “We must not make the mistake of equating refugees with terrorists,” Ursula Von der Leyen, German defence minister, told the Monday edition of the German newspaper “Passauer Neue Presse,” according to Deutsche Welle, the German external broadcaster.
A once progressive Arab civilisation boundless and bare
A thousand years ago when Europe was in the period known as the Dark Ages, the Arab world was generally an area of tolerance and trade. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous 1817 sonnet “Ozymandias” was about the “colossal wreck, boundless and bare” of a once …
Startups: Successful CEO-cum-founders a very rare breed
Noam Wasserman, a professor at Harvard Business School, wrote in a Harvard Business Review article in 2008: “Every would-be entrepreneur wants to be a Bill Gates, a Phil Knight, or an Anita Roddick, each of whom founded a large company and led it for m…