They might all be idiots to you and me, but you can always spot a “Goldman Man.” It takes someone with balls of steel to open a shop in this market, especially one that sells books worth a minimum of £3,000! Meet Karl Fowler, former Goldman Sachs banker and brains behind publisher Kraken Opus. His first shop opened in London’s  Covent Garden, to sell the 35kg, 50cm square books on Sir Bobby Charlton, Diego Maradona and Vivienne Westwood. They sell for between £3,000 and £20,000 depending on the signatures of the stars that are included, while a Manchester United book fetched $1.6m (£1m) at a recent auction in Dubai. Mr Fowler, who plans to open another 12 shops from New York to Abu Dhabi, says that despite the economic downturn, demand for his books is huge. Put me down for the one about “H” from Steps.

All this money flying around – who makes it? Not just the government, De La Rue, is the world’s largest banknote printer not owned by a government producing currancies for more than 150 nations. They have seen a 24% rise in profits giving them nearly £50m from the last six months to play with at the casino. New boss Leo Quinn is carrying on with getting that conservatory built on the side of his house as he brags: “We see no weakness in the market out there. We have not seen weakness for five or six years.” De La Rue produces currencies for more than 150 nations. Opportunities to work abroad and advertisied manager vacancies for UK grads…worth putting your money on I’d say.

Companies like John Lewis and the Co-operative Group are owned by their staff, so everyone gets a cheque when the profits are calculated. Given the falling sales at John Lewis that looks unlikely to be much of a handout right now, but over at Co-op staff and customers have close to £9m to divvy up between them – though half of those due to receive payment have elected to donate a proportion of their dividends to charity, meaning about £500,000 will be distributed to community groups. Customers or Members earn points when they trade with the group and these are then converted into a share of the profits. The group’s businesses include banking, food retailing, pharmacy, travel, property, farming, and legal services. The 2008 interim dividend is more than £2 million higher than last year, as the group works to deliver a strategy to double profits. Seems like a safe bet.

It’s fair to say our current woes began thanks to the USA and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco where banks took on debt people could never pay back if times got tough. So while Darling the Badger is committing this country to the sort of debt I run up at the club on casino night, its worth looking over the pond to see how President Obama is going to get us all out of this mess: “Obanomics” is what they are calling it. The good news is he does have a plan. First he wants to create and save 2.5 million US jobs by investing in the national infrastructure. Then he announced his new finance task force – saying they would start work straight away. A “jolt” to the economy means chucking money at it. An estimated $700bn in this case (making Darling’s strides look like peanuts). Obama himself said the problem was “no longer just an American crisis, it is a global crisis - and we will need to reach out to countries around the world to craft a global response”. Good luck with that. Thank the Lord the old bloke with “Country First” as his slogan didn’t get in!

There’s a recession on and those companies and employers that don’t pull their socks up are going to lose their pants. Just so in the case of Liberata – the company behind student maintenance allowances, who have botched the delivery of those grants; thousands of students are still waiting for their payments, more than two months after the beginning of term, as a result of Liberata encountering technical difficulties in processing EMA applications (paid to about 600,000 teenagers from low-income families as an incentive to keep them from dropping out of education).  At one stage the backlog of applications was in excess of 200,000. Despite reducing this backlog to 12,000 the government (Learning and Skills Council) have found it “unacceptable” that young people had had their EMA payments delayed and awarded the contract to Capita. That cock-up has lost Liberata over £60m in revenues, but the BBC has claimed that Liberata knew a year ago that it would be unable to fulfil the contract. Don’t worry; as is often the way with companies who fail on government contracts, they bounce back to make a hash of something equally important months later!