With the world economy in a tailspin and UK shoppers hunkered down in their trenches wearing tin-hats,  the one thing you really wouldn’t want to be doing this week is opening a £1.7bn, 43 acre, 265-store mega shopping centre in central London. But that’s exactly what the luckless Westfield, the largest urban shopping centre in Europe (right on MT’s doorstep here in West London) is doing: Mayor Boris is cutting the ribbon (and probably falling over his bootlaces) on Wednesday.

Westfield is a serious piece of work: it took 13m man hours to build, should create 7000 jobs and is hoping for 20m visitors each year. The plan when it was conceived was to create a middle-to-top-end venue that would draw destination shoppers away from Bluewater and lakeside Thurrock. The thinking was sound, but the reality into which it is being launched is chilly. Even Westfield’s slogan – ‘Shopping in a new light’ – will have an unfortunate double-meaning.

They’ve done a good job persuading plenty of big names to take space – M&S, Topshop, Next, Waitrose, as well as Tiffany and Gucci. Even the (slightly past it) Abercrombie & Fitch is pitching in. 

Quite apart from agonising about levels of footfall, another nightmare for Westfield is that a good number of the outlets – Karen Millen, Coast, Oasis, House of Fraser – are rented by Baugur, the stricken Icelandic investor. The Aussie landlords will be wanting to get those rent cheques cashed – assuming they can get their hands on them in the first place.

On the plus side, the entire staff of Grazia magazine has been dragooned into producing an issue of their gorgeous mag from inside a giant Perspex pod at Westfield. So there are some bright things to look forward to...

In today's bulletin:
Markets tank again as panic goes global
Sales slide is no small beer
Editor's blog: Bad timing for Westfield
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: Knowing me, knowing you
The Snowball Effect

Congratulations are due to the Indians, who yesterday successfully launched their first mission to the Moon. The unmanned Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft blasted off from a launch pad in southern Andhra Pradesh and its robotic probe will orbit the Moon, compiling a 3-D atlas of the lunar surface and mapping the distribution of elements and minerals. It’s a vital morale booster for the ultra-competitive Indians as they race to keep up with other Asian space-faring nations.

It reminded me that India remains ‘a land of contrasts’, as they used to say in the Indian tourist office poster. The other side of India was revealed to me recently by a senior executive from a global weekly business publication. This magazine has high hopes for penetration of the Indian market and has overcome the swathes of red tape and regulation to build a healthy base of eager subscribers. In taking the country’s business media by storm, though, it didn’t bank on the unusual work practices of the average Indian postman. Apparently it’s quite common for highly desirable foreign magazines which are mailed to readers not to arrive for weeks, even months, after they are sent from the distribution centre.

A closer examination of Delhi and Bangalore’s Postmen Pat revealed some novel, and highly entrepreneurial activity. It’s quite common for Pat to supplement his modest income by renting out magazines he’s supposed to deliver to other customers on his round before it actually arrives in the letterbox of the original, official subscriber.  And when it does turn up, it’s often so well-thumbed and marked-up with excited commentary in biro that it’s completely dog-eared. The problem is so widespread that said weekly now has to hand-deliver all copies by a private courier.

We’re all for readers sharing their copies of MT. And if you’re guilty of snaffling the office copy, maybe you should sign up here for a sub...  

In today's bulletin:
High street fright as shoppers take flight
Shy away from retiring
Editor's blog: Indian delivery problems
Survey sends BSkyB plunging
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: Bremner does Peston

For the last seven years, we’ve had a house in Le Marche region of Italy – and when we took my new-born son Ludo there last year, the natives went wild over him.

One big reason for this (apart from the fact that he’s inherited the Gwyther good looks, of course) is that Italy has a real shortage of babies. In fact, the country now has one of the lowest birth-rates in Europe. Unless something drastic happens, 15% of its rapidly-ageing population will be over 80 by 2060.

This would be a disaster for the economy - it will limit the country’s productivity and provide a hugely expensive burden for the working population. The problem has now become so acute that Berlusconi’s even starting bribing people to reproduce (as usual, the plan backfired).

This week, the BBC asked me to talk about the issue for their ‘From Our Correspondent’ slot. You can listen to my thoughts HERE, or if you’re more visually-minded, you can read it below or on the BBC site.

In today's bulletin:
Recession is here - but cheer up
Ashley spends £3m at JJB
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: More fuel for engine room
Editor's blog: Bambino crisis in Italy
Books Special: David Davies on FA Confidential

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It was an inauspicious day on which to discover your dream home – September 11th 2001. My wife Victoria and I were on a short trip to Le Marche region of Italy and I was showing her around. This was my wife’s first visit and her property-detecting sonar was pinging louder than a u-boat under depth charge attack

An estate agent  was showing us a variety of deserted, tumble-down places minus roofs, all of which suited our modest budget, when on a ridge near the tiny, medieval hilltop village of Monte san Martino we saw Casa Lola, as we now call it. There was no arguing that the view was quite sublime - in front, rolling hills of oak with a lake in the valley below, to the right the Sibillini mountains, which rise to 8,000 feet. 

It was a classic Italian country farmhouse in yellow stone, where animals had occupied the small ground floor stalls.  Its previous owner, an elderly woman called Elisa, had died a number of years before. Her son who was single had predeceased her. There were no grandchildren. Elisa’s bottle of Cynar liqueur and her packet of Fisherman’s Friends were still in the tiny kitchen and her medical bills dating back to the 1930s were in the dresser.

But her other family, in common with many rural Italians, wanted to live in something more modern. It was not hard to see why.  The power line had been blown down, the lavatory and bath emptied through the bathroom wall via a pipe that stopped outside in mid-air. The roof on the cowshed next door where old Lola, the Friesian had chewed her cud, had collapsed. Not an easy place to bring up a family. Victoria was smitten. I was terrified – seeing nothing but telephone number restoration bills.

Anyway, seven years on, our house is restored and to our great joy we have had a baby. This was a delight to us - not least because we have a combined age of 89 years - but it’s left our Italian neighbours close to delirium. Our son was born in the UK, but word quickly got round of Ludo’s safe arrival and someone attached a large blue bow on our front door. Pictures were emailed over and passed round the village. His first appearance drew admirers and the presents piled up.

When we wheeled him to our local restaurant, Angelica the chef burst into tears when she first took him into her flour-covered arms, and her husband refused to let us pay for our meal. To everyone’s relief, he enjoys pasta and resides in the 98th percentile for his weight. ‘Molto robusto,’ noted our farmer neighbour Umberto with approval.

Ludo’s baptism took place in the local church under the frames of two 15th century Crivelli masterpieces and he contributed with baboon noises throughout the service. You don’t see that many baptisms under the Crivellis these days, though. The unfortunate truth is there are precious few babies in our neck of the woods. Italy, for a variety of complex socioeconomic factors, has one of the lowest birth-rates in Europe.

Three years ago, in an effort to encourage families, the Italian premier Berlusconi offered prizes of 1,000 Euros to parents who produced a child. The cheque arrived for each infant complete with a letter signed ‘Big Kisses from Silvio’. Not for the first time in Berlusconi’s career, the publicity gimmick backfired when it was demanded that 3,000 immigrant families give the money back because they were ineligible.  Nor has it increased native Italians’ ardour to get reproducing.

The latest report from Eurostat published last week makes sobering reading. It projects that in twelve years’ time, Italy will have the highest proportion of over-65s in Europe. By 2020, almost 23% of the population will be over three-score-years-and-five. And as for the over 80s – Italians live a long while – Italy is already top of the pops in this table with 5.5%; by 2060, a staggering 15% of the population will be over 80 years old. 

The day before the baptism, we had attended the wedding of some friends. It is common for Italians to marry late these days and both the bride and groom are in their mid-forties. At the wedding feast on our table were three childless couples, all in the early stages of middle age. After a few glasses of the local Rosso Piceno, as he entertained my baby son, one of the husbands admitted to me that he and his wife have been trying to have a child for ages to no avail. They’d probably left it too late, and the possibility of any sort of assisted conception in Italy is highly restricted – not least because the Vatican disapproves so vehemently. They were looking into adoption. I counted my blessings, toasted the bride and groom and took the baby off to change the sixth nappy of the day.

When you’re an Icelander cast adrift in the turbulent North Atlantic, you grab whichever lifebelt is chucked your way before you freeze to death within seconds.  That’s the advice one would give to the beleaguered Jon Asgeir Johannesson of Baugur, which is thought to have between one and two billion pounds of debt held by the Icelandic banks that collapsed last week.

Anything to do with Iceland has a very grubby image these days, a situation that may well take many years to change. So the news that Sir Philip Green, the owner of BHS, was willing to jump into his Gulfstream last Friday and hot-foot it up to Reykavik with his cheque-book in hand must have been heartening for Johannesson. Though if Green’s people have been sweating over the books, Johannesson shouldn’t expect an easy deal. 

'If you're on your way home and you go past a house with a sign outside saying 'half price', you're going to knock on the door, aren't you?' said Sir Philip chirpily yesterday from his place back in Monaco. There’s nothing Sir Phil likes more than to watch the tide go out and see who’s actually got their trunks on.

If he’s successful, Green could find himself the head of a vastly-expanded High Street empire, with hugely discounted stakes in House of Fraser, Mappin & Webb, Oasis, Warehouse and Whistles. There’s even a chunk of the hapless French Connection in there. 'There's a buyer and there's a seller and that's how business has always been done. It's just that there's not many buyers now,' says the UK’s favourite retailer.

Sir Philip has played the last few years very skilfully. He took his £1.2 billion divi from BHS way back in 2005, and since then has been able to invest without having to get himself in dangerous hock to the banks. Cash-rich private buyers are going to be in very powerful positions in the next twelve months.

So don’t be surprised to see Sir Phil in charge at Hamley’s (another Baugur jewel) by Christmas. With that perma-tan and the tumbling chest hair, he’d look quite something in the Santa suit.  

In today's bulletin:
RBS humbled in massive state bail-out
Mission Impossible for Iceland?
Editor's blog: Green shoots of recovery for Baugur
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: Herd mentality at DEFRA
Asian Jewels in the crown?

Robbie, as he’s known to his mates, kissed goodbye to £1 billion inside 24 hours. As someone far too wrapped up in the fortunes of Icelandic banks, he was forced to offload his stakes in Sainsbury’s and Mitchells & Butlers - as Kaupthing went into the gyre and then off down the Swannee.

If there was ever a car crash waiting to happen, it was Robert Tchenguiz’s various contract-for-difference vehicles, which he used to build stakes in pub groups and supermarkets. Armed with his derivatives, he’d then try to intimidate the companies into realising the value of their property assets - i.e. leverage themselves up to the hilt. For management teams, he was presumably a right royal pain in the the backside, since they'd spend vast amounts of time fending him off. I doubt if Justin King, the Sainsbury’s boss, will be sorry to see the back of him.

Robbie is said to be philosophical about things. An acquaintance quoted in the FT implied that these losses would just be water off a duck's back: 'These guys are mobile traders; they could be here, they could be gone tomorrow, they could move up to Los Angeles and start up again or head out to the Middle East.' Leaving the rest of us to clear up the mess.

I suspect one of the effects of the current maelstrom is that we all have a long, hard look at company ownership. A timely report has appeared this week from Tomorrow's Company and it makes worrying reading. Are companies like Sainsbury's just the easily-tossed chips of high-rolling roulette players like Tchenguiz? Or does stewardship imply something more permanent and with a different level of responsibility? And if so, to whom?

I met Tchenguiz briefly once amid a cloud of fag smoke inside his seriously tasteless Mayfair office. The setup was made all the more bizarre by the frequent presence of Robbie (and his brother Vincent)’s father, who would hold court in an anteroom. He was quite a character, and would make woeful observations about his son’s fast private life. The old boy even gave his tie to the MT photographer who had turned up to take his son’s portrait. Here’s what we wrote about Robbie way back in the good old days...

In today's bulletin:
Glimmer of hope for house prices
WH Smith fuels high street optimism
Iceland's frosty relations as Kaupthing falls
Editor's blog: Feeling Robbie's £1bn pain
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: Google saves our email blushes

1) I went to the dentist for my regular six-monthly check up yesterday. Nothing special to report – the usual minor plaque scrape and 'make sure you floss very carefully at the back' - and I was sent packing after paying my £75 bill. My dentist, like 99% of others in London, doesn’t want to know about the NHS these days. They like things private, with cash on the nail. Anyway as I was booking the next appointment for April 2009, I suddenly thought: why don’t I extend the six months to eight or nine? Wouldn’t make any difference. I’m not going to expire from gum disease in the interim. Save a couple of quid. It’s tiny little marginal decisions like this – some made semi-consciously - taken by all of us, that slow things down. I’m not remotely worried about the welfare of my dentist – she’ll be fine (show me a hard-up dentist). But her amalgam-maker, her drill-manufacturer and the mouthwash-producer are going to feel a little pinch.

2) We bought my 13-month-old son his first pair of shoes at the weekend. The kids’ department of Peter Jones on the King’s Road is a bedlam of wailing sprogs, dazed, heavily-pregnant mums-to-be and irritable fathers even at the best of times. Saturday was no exception. We put our names down on the list to be served and I noticed on the wall display of infant footwear that a couple were half-price – down to about £10. We finally got served, after The Kid had crawled the floors, pulled books off the shelves and removed his socks. He was measured up and four pairs were brought out from the stock room.  The two cut-price booties weren’t that nice, the third was so-so but the pair of Clarks in Size 5G was nice. The sort of thing in which a proud parent wants his child shod for those first, precious steps.  Surprise surprise, they were far and away the priciest at £30. I bought them because a) I wanted to get out fast; b) quality is quality; and c) you do the right thing, even in a downturn.

3) My 80-year-old father gave my 13-year-old son £20 on Sunday (having lived through the Depression, he knows the importance of keeping cash sloshing through the system). As soon as we got back to our house, the 13-year-old was on the laptop and into Top Man’s website. Within 10 minutes he’d blown the lot on some of Philip Green’s finest teenage threads. This shows a) the young who have grown up through the boom years clearly have no sense of saving money. Sod Icesave - they get it, they spend it. And b) this might be very good for the UK economy - the downturn won’t stop the young spending what they have as fast as they get it. Assuming indulgent parents and grandparents keep it coming...    

In today's bulletin:
Rates slashed as bail-out fails to calm jitters
Sainsbury bucks trend with sales hike
The true cost of the Icesave meltdown
Editor's blog: What does the crunch mean for you?
MT's Little Ray of Sunshine: Pay peanuts, get monkeys  

Almost exactly two years ago I spent a weird couple of days up in Reykjavik, Iceland, investigating the mystery of the Icelandic miracle. At about two in the morning, I found myself in Café Oliver just off the main drag in the capital with the staff of the leading bank Landsbanki, who were vigorously celebrating getting away a $2.25 billion bond issue. The lager and shots were flowing faster than a burst pipe. Landsbanki has today been nationalised, the revellers are now civil servants and Iceland is facing economic collapse.

At the time Iceland’s economy had grown by 50% over ten years. It was in the world’s top ten richest countries, with a GDP per capita of £30,000, and about 75% of the revenue made by the 22 firms listed on the country's stock exchange was generated abroad. This tiny nation of 300,000 souls was busy taking over large chunks of the UK high street and even lowly West Ham football club (I can say that – I’m a long-suffering fan). Three hundred thousand Brits now have money on deposit with Iceland’s banks; Landsbanki’s UK Icesave online account, for example, was an overnight sensation when it was launched offering amazing interest rates - this morning they've all been frozen.  

For such a small nation, it wasn’t surprising that a complex web of cross-ownership existed with companies all holding stakes in each other. I wrote then that: 'This set-up is a classic precursor to a house-of-cards collapse' - although I felt slightly guilty for being such a party-pooper in the face of such a buccaneering sense of enterprise. But I wasn’t alone. Plenty of people smelled a rat. There was dark talk of dirty Russian money being laundered through the system. Some of that cash, however filthy, would be more than welcome now (Update: the Russians may have just promised to loan the Iceland central bank €4bn to save it from bankruptcy - a friend in need is a friend indeed).

Amid all the exuberance I met Professor Tryggvi Thor Herbertsson, an economist from the University of Iceland. He was a sober, thoughtful academic who although optimistic seemed a realist about the limits of his country’s capabilities. He acknowledged the wealth but remembered how things had been: 'At the turn of the 20th century we were the poorest country in Europe. We were worse off than Albania'.

With his nation teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, I phoned the Professor this morning to see how things were going. 'He’s not here any more', said a colleague, 'he now works in the Prime Minister’s office'. Professor Herbertsson has been busy nationalising banks and no doubt struggling to ensure that, as the long, dark Winter nights draw in, he and his fellow country folk don’t return to Albanian standards of living.  I wish him luck.

In today's bulletin:
RBS sinks amid funding fears
Green defends BHS battering
Editor's blog: Iceland fears perma-frost as Landsbanki falls
Fuld gets Congress reality check
Workers get thanks for nothing

There’s a very good article by Gillian Tett in the FT today which chides bankers for the murkiness of their world. For the last ten years they have been shielded from view, hard at their arcane business without ever making much effort to explain the workings of their toils to everyone else. '21st century bankers', she writes, 'have been acting like a Blackberry-toting priestly class that assumed that only people who spoke the equivalent of advanced financial Latin should be allowed to attend mass'.

At MT we’ve had good open relations with retail banks over the years – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds all allowed us good access to their bosses and those in the ranks. But the investment banks were always very different in their approach. A good deal snootier. Whenever during my time at MT we have made attempts to get in touch with investment banks, about any number of subjects, calls were rarely returned. Even if our intent was friendly rather than in the form of awkward questioning, they never wanted to know. They were closed institutions as far as we were concerned. Simply far too busy with their lusty embrace of Mammon - which began when they reached their desks at 7am and went on long into the night - to bother with the media generally. Ok, so MT is a general business publication and they must have had some sort of relationship with their specialist correspondents. But it left a bad impression.

Even before the events of the credit crunch and Black September, the world of high finance was a communications disaster, a PR man’s bad dream. You cannot afford to be mute in the modern world, however well it all appears to be going and however much cash you are raking in. And after the right royal mess they have got us all into, they have some explaining to do. The fact that Joe Public never fully understood what they were up to is one thing. That’s a solvable communications problem.  The even more terrifying emerging truth is that they didn’t really fully grasp the implications of Faustian fooling with complex derivatives themselves. Or maybe they did and knew it was all going to end in calamity, but didn’t care as long as they filled their boots first.  

I doubt if they will be able to carry on behaving in this way. In the future they will need to be far more transparent and far more patient when they explain a) what a collateralised debt obligation is and b) whether they are a very good idea for anyone in the long term or should just be placed with spent uranium in a deep, dark hole. If they are ever going to regain the trust of the general public, they are going to need to start talking and explaining. Quickly.

In today's bulletin:
Mandy's back - and he means Business
UBS culls another 2,000 jobs
No crunch for card fraudsters
Editor's blog: Shining a light on banking's dark arts
Appealing to emotions, with YouTube

Chris Blackhurst’s article in today’s London Evening Standard is going to make a lot of folk boil with anger. It’s a clever piece of red rag waving. As the City editor of The Daily Mail’s sister paper (and also an MT Contributing Editor), Chris’s brief will have been to get his finger on whatever the reverse of a g-spot is. An aggro-spot, perhaps. He has succeeded admirably.

It paints a picture of a lot of City bankers who may currently have their heads down with some mild shell shock, but who are planning to carry on raking it in pretty much as before - and are markedly lacking in a sense of culpability. 'We’re still having our party,' says one, unnamed source, 'but the age of conspicuous consumption is no longer acceptable in any shape or form'. Another likely lad from Canary Wharf writes off the failure of the US congress to pass the Paulson plan as 'a few Ozark hillbillies venting their spleen'. Then just to rub salt into our painful cuts, Chris reveals that one head-hunter is having to fight with Nomura over Lehman traders: 'Last year someone was earning £500,000. Their bank goes bust and Nomura is saying here’s £600,000 and for two years. They’re better off now than they were under Lehman.'

The implication of this is clear. Although we’re now heading into some pretty miserable times, that misery will be felt far more keenly by the rest of us than by those who have created it. Many of these people are sitting in their £4 million houses in Surrey and Essex with mortgages paid off and enough money stashed away to pay for the school fees and two weeks over Xmas in Courcheval for the next ten years. They’re all right Jack, and bugger the rest of us.

Well, even if this is exactly how it is, I wouldn’t want to be an investment banker at the moment. I’m not sure how secure their futures are even if Paulson’s plan goes through and governments are forced to bail out and guarantee savings until the exchequer is empty. Of course I’d love some of an investment banker’s vast wad of cash, but I’m not sure I could cope with the opprobrium of the public at large. Those in  finance are set to be Public Enemy Number One for some time yet. One level up from axe murderers and paedophiles. The legislators will be out to get them in the traditional cack-handed way, as they seek to curb their remuneration.

Being an Andy Hornby, a Dick Fuld or a mere minor Master of the Canary Wharf Universe is likely to get you punched on the nose at the moment. Even the most battle-hardened and cynical of wall Street types must have been taken aback by the strength of disapproval from Middle America. Over here, if you look at the Telegraph’s website, for example, there is some venomous vitriol (some of it of a very nasty anti-semitic variety) being spewed out by angry US readers. And, as we all enter a chilly economic Winter, that anger is going to take a long time to cool.

In today's bulletin:
PM bets the House on HBOS rescue
Editor's blog: What Moral Hazard?
Royal dressmaker hangs by a thread
How to keep it in the family
Busted bankers fall back on charity