I'm never sure about the German sense of humour, but I hope their latest suggestion is made with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

They've suggest to Greece that one of the best ways to raise cash would be sell off some of their islands. One big newspaper headline read 'We Give You Cash, You Give Us Corfu!'.

When you say it out loud, it actually doesn't seem that bad a deal.

Not over yet for Digest
The UK arm of Reader's Digest could well be rescued by one of the nearly 100 potential buyers who have registered an interest in the embattled magazine.

Apparently, around 30% of the approaches are for the whole business, according to administrators of the 72-year-old British title. With a staff of 117 across the UK and circulation of nearly half a million, it would be a result if one of the suitors decides to go the whole way.

If you had shares in Centrica, owners of British Gas, then last week was a mixed week. One minute you discover that the company has made a brilliant profit, in collusion with Mother Nature and the Big Freeze.

The next minute you learn that you're going have to cut the prices you charge consumers in the future because making such large profits at their expense isn't really the done thing.

Man from the Pru comes through
Endowment policies have stunk in recent years and many finance companies who provided them went through real pain over problems with mis-selling and plummeting values of with-profit funds.

So the news from Prudential that it is paying out £2 billion to its customers after a strong performance of its funds in 2009 is a bit of a surprise for its 4 million customers.

Not that they're complaining of course - particularly if you are one of those who has paid £50 into an endowment policy over the last 25 years, because it would now be worth more than £35,000 if it matures this year.

Becoming more and more like Master Oogway, from Kung Fu Panda, every week, the pronouncements of the Governor of the Bank of England are like cryptic clues from another time that are cast among us mortals to decipher how best we can.

This week it was talk of the "double-dip" recession, which in other circles is called the "W" recovery for the shape it makes when plotted on a chart. Whatever you want to call it, this is the first time Mervyn King has mentioned it out loud and suddenly that fragile recovery is looking even thinner.

Follow that up with some pretty grim news on the jobless front, with another couple of thousand people facing the axe just this week and it looks like talk about green shoots of recovery is naively premature.

Merlin loses its magic

The private equity group behind Alton Towers and Madame Tussauds has shelved plans for a stockmarket float this week and high street fashion chain New Look is meeting today to see if it should ditch its offering as well.

After a Christmas and New Year rally, the FTSE 100 stock index is heading downwards again after some not-so-good news from the US over jobless figures and reports of economic wobbles in Portugal and Greece.

From a healthy 5600 points in January, the FTSE 100 has now lost 9% with yesterday's dip alone wiping £29 billion off the price of leading shares.

Strangely, one of the winners on the day was British Airways which posted a loss of £50 million for the quarter but this was less than analysts expected so the share price rose.

Virgin are pushing ahead with their plans to become a high street bank and is looking to a former boss of Lloyds TSB to head up the challenge.

Sir Brian Pitman, the former chairman and chief executive of the banking group has been tapped to front Virgin Money's bid to launch its bank later this year. Already, they're in the middle of buying up a small regional private bank Church House Trust to fast-track its aims to secure a banking licence. Virgin is also widely seen as a front runner to bid for the "good" part of nationalised bank Northern Rock.

When Sir Richard Branson sets his mind on something, nothing much stands in his way! Wouldn't he be better than Sir Alan heading up The Apprentice?

The reaction to Kraft's imminent takeover of Cadbury continues to rumble along with the latest news being an announcement from US chocolate maker Hershey that they won't be making a rival bid to the £11.9 billion offer already on the table.

Considering that Hershey were only ever a side-bet on having any involvement, it's strange they even felt it necessary to say anything at all. But it does give you an idea on the backroom machinations that are still going like the clappers in a bid to scupper Kraft's deal.

Everyone has had a say on this most controversial of hostile takeovers, from the Government trying to get Kraft to guarantee jobs to the Dairylea-makers key shareholder Warren Buffet expressing his reservations about the whole deal.

Though it's really down to the shareholders and that offer of 840p a share is mighty tempting.

London's favourite buffoon, Mayor Boris Johnson has launched into the row over the Chancellor's proposed introduction of a 50p income tax rate for top earners and a temporary 50% levy on banking bonuses over £25,000.

BoJo reckons up to 9,000 bankers could find the new taxes so hard to swallow that they will relocate abroad, with knock-on effects for London's legal, accountancy, publishing and media industries. Well maybe they will. But one solution I heard the other day was that the banks would just wear the taxes and the bonus payments that the individuals receive would effectively remain untouched.

It's a great soundbite that all this financial "talent" would flee London for Geneva or Frankfurt putting one of our key export industries in jeopardy. The reality, I suspect, is not quite so dramatic.

Cheese or chocolate, which do you prefer?

Because if Cadbury and Kraft really want to settle their ongoing dispute once and for all, then maybe they can just ask all the shareholders of the globally-known British chocolate brand that one simple question and leave out all the bad-mouthing.

The manufacturers of Dairy Milk have called on their shareholders not to let Kraft "steal their company" in the latest episode of the ongoing takeover saga that has seen the British company already rejecting an offer of around £10.5 billion.

The chocolate war took a dramatic turn in Cadbury's favour this week as key Kraft shareholder and über-billionaire Warren Buffet suggested a hostile takeover was not in the US company's interests.

And that meant they had blinked first in this stand-off with the stubborn Brits, who have snorted with derision at the £10.2 billion on offer for their business, dismissing Kraft as a "low-growth conglomerate" while being very uppish about their own business prospects.

With Nestlé passing on any interest at all in the whole thing, that leaves just Hershey, from the States, and maybe Ferrero from Italy as any sort of players.

Woohoo! It's back to work for everyone and this time there's some good news.

While the majority of people took advantage of the perfect storm of bank holidays to take a whole week off between Christmas and New Year, the global share markets were still recovering from a massive year-long hangover and they continued the pre-Chrimbo bounce-back with style.

For the first time since the fall of Lehman Brothers, which signalled the start of all things bad, the FTSE 100 share index, of the top 100 UK companies, has topped 5500 points on just the first working day of 2010.