If a billionaire wants to buy two painting for £300m that’s his business. But how can UK galleries justify buying them for £100m (unless they are planning to flip them to the billionaire and keep the profit?).
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There is a small oasis in the housing market where prices have not fallen. New homes. While other property prices plunge, builders refuse to cut theirs. Perhaps that’s why they’re not selling?
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Would the Olympic athletes run faster or jump higher if paid? Would they train more intensively for a cash reward? There is a suggestion Britain should pay its medal winners money, with £20,000 for a gold.
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Pawnbroking is booming despite interest rates of 8 per cent – a month. A sign of recession and a haven for the feckless you may say – but think of it as banking and it makes more sense.
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The Competition Commission has moved into new startling territory in ordering BAA to split up its airport business. Until now it has blocked expansion: now it is telling established businesses to shrink.
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Woolworth has emerged as the latest pension fund with a business attached but giving away the operating assets is no way out of the problem.
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Ivan Lewis, a health minister in Gordon Brown’s government, is calling for a tax on the rich to subsidise the poor. Such a policy may have worked for Robin Hood but it would not work nowadays either fiscally or politically.
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Name the 12 primary sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. The only point of them handing over $100m each is to improve their brand awareness, so if you can’t name them now the starting gun has been fired, it doesn’t look like money well spent.
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The target for UK inflation is 2 per cent. In June it was admitted price rises had reached the 3 per cent trigger that requires a Bank of England letter. The July consumer prices index annual change exceeded 4 per cent.

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If we’re going to have a recession it must extend to the public sector. Corporations cannot be expected to take the strain while state employees are unscathed.
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