Will the bank give way on rates?
The recession we're currently in must be the most widely-advertised in living memory but that hasn't stopped the Government, forecasters and some companies acting as if a nuclear wasp has been unleashed in a locked boardroom.
The Government is battling with foreign-owned oil companies to launch a scheme to help people who will struggle to pay their fuel bills, Number 10 is battling with the Treasury and the Bank of England over a scheme to underwrite mortgages and consultants KPMG announced this morning that many analysts were "in denial" about the hit company earnings are about to take as consumer expenditure dries up.
A relative oasis of calm in all this appears to be the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England which meets this week to muse about interest rates.
Last week the consensus was that rates were unlikely to move as the MPC still feared that inflation (expected to peak soon at around 5%) remained a bigger danger than recession.
Now the markets are not so sure. They're already factoring in a quarter point cut sometime later this year and two members of the "shadow MPC", another collection of City wise men that tries to anticipate what the real MPC will do, called for immediate half point cuts, as will long-time MPC dove David Blanchflower when the real committee meets.
Blanchflower, who is based in America, forecast last week that unemployment would rise to two million by Christmas unless the Bank acts now, not what the Government or indeed anyone else apart from the most ardent monetarist wants to hear.
These days a half point cut in interest rates signals panic, an acknowledgement in an era of quarter point rate changes that you got it wrong.
The prospect of having to cut by half a point later in the year may just persuade Bank governor Mervyn King and some of his cautious colleagues to go for a quarter point in September, a move that, among other things, would reduce some of the mounting political pressure on them.
TNS deal may have further to go
WPP's bid for market researcher TNS will now run to September 12 and may be extended after that.
Despite German rival GfK dropping out of the running, less than 9% of TNS shareholders had accepted WPP's 268p a share bid by last Friday, with the TNS share price at 274p.
WPP's share price was up too, thereby increasing its cash and share bid slightly, but the TNS price suggests investors still feel a higher bid, from WPP presumably, may be on the way.
WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell has said he won't increase his bid and most commentators seem to regard the takeover as a done deal.
At the moment though the TNS share price isn't saying that.
Microsoft tops up internet holdings
Microsoft is planning to buy Europe's biggest price comparison website Ciao.com for $486m, its first major deal since the aborted takeover of Yahoo!.
This looks a reasonable price for a proven product (insofar as you can say that about anything in such a changeable landscape) but it still begs the question, what is Microsoft's overall internet strategy post-Yahoo!?
You would need to buy an awful lot of Ciaos to get anywhere near Google's domination of the medium. Microsoft's fear must be that Yahoo!, which already has an ad-sharing deal with Google, will cosy up even closer to the market leader, leaving Microsoft on the margins of the internet ad market.
Hurricane Gustav oil price shock
Hurricane Gustav is to land on New Orleans today having already shut down oil and gas production and refining in the Gulf of Mexico.
Let's hope the combination of timely evacuation and the seawall defences introduced since Hurricane Katrina save this wonderful city and its people.
The price of Texas Light Crude oil rose by just a dollar yesterday in advance of Gustav before falling back to $115 and that really is a shock. Why only a short-lived dollar?
One reason is that the US government is going to release stocks from its reserves to counter the shortfall.
But another is that many analysts expect the price of oil to carry on falling as soon as this crisis is over.
Oil has fallen back from a peak of $147 a barrel a couple of months ago to its current levels despite a brief rally in the price when the crisis in Georgia broke.
With the US economy slowing sharply (although it may escape recession), recession in Europe and even China curbing its massive process of construction and industrialization now that the Olympics are over we may well see oil prices falling below $100 before the end of the year.
This will be a welcome relief for governments and companies across the world (consumers, as usual, will probably have to wait) although it won't necessarily help the markets rise higher as it will hit the share prices of energy companies and miners, their main support for the past 18 months.
It may come too late for the likes of XL Leisure, the third-largest UK holiday company/airline.
Barclays, a bank which has been telling us things aren't as bad as all that ever since the credit crunch broke, has pulled its financing for XL's fuel hedging operations.
This is bad news for XL obviously, and something of a PR problem for Barclays.
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.