Contributed by Martin Mitchell of the Corporate Training Group

In case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:

Economic Backdrop

• The US non-farm payrolls report showed that the economy lost 247,000 jobs in July, below the median estimate of 320,000 from a Reuters’ survey of economists.
• A separate survey of US households showed that the unemployment rate slipped from 9.5% in June to 9.4% in July.
• Both the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee and the European Central Bank decided to keep their interest rates on hold at 0.5% and 1% respectively.
• The Bank of England also announced that it will add a further £50bn to the £125bn it has already pumped into the financial system under its policy of quantitative easing.
• Questions are being asked about the reliability of China’s GDP figures with first half numbers from the provincial authorities some 10% higher than those reported by the National Bureau of Statistics. At worst, there are worries that individuals in the provinces manufacture the figures to improve their career prospects.
• Surveys showed that global manufacturing is on the rebound, with activity contracting at a significantly slower pace in the US and continental Europe, and UK industry back on a growth path.

Mergers and Acquisitions

• Energy company Centrica won approval from the UK’s Office of Fair Trading to buy a 20% stake in British Energy from EDF for £2.3bn. However the deal involves half the deal being paid in cash and the other half via the sale of Centrica’s 51% stake in SPE, the Belgian utility company, to EDF. The SPE sale is still awaiting European Commission clearance.
• Deutsche Bank is in advanced talks to take a stake in Sal Oppenheim, one of Europe’s biggest independent private banks. Sal Oppenheim has about €130bn under management.
• Bank of New York Mellon is in advanced talks to buy the bulk of Insight Investment Management, one of the UK’s biggest fund managers. BNY Mellon won an auction for Insight, which is being sold by Lloyds banking Group. It is thought that the cost could be up to £250m to purchase the third-party business of Insight that has approximately £74bn under management.
• British media company ITV is to sell Friends Reunited, the social networking site, to DC Thomson for £25m. It is less than 4 years since ITV bought Friends United for £170m.
• Stagecoach and the Spanish-led consortium (the Cosmen family and CVC) bidding for UK travel company National Express have been told to ‘put up or shut up’ by the UK Takeover Panel. The bidders must make a firm offer by September 11th or walk away.
• PepsiCo has agreed to take control of its two largest bottlers, Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG) and PepsiAmericas (PAS) in a $7.8bn deal. PepsiCo was advised by Centerview Partners, BofA Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. PBG was advised by Morgan Stanley and PAS by Goldman Sachs. Read more

by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

Women may be less likely to encounter blatant sexism on the job than in prior years, but a recent study suggests “modern sexism” is still keeping women from achieving the highest level of success in corporate America. Modern sexism is often defined as a more subtle form of discrimination that is deeply ingrained in a corporate culture and can be as, if not more, damaging than overt acts of gender bias. Authored by chief scientist Ann Howard and senior vice president Richard Wellins of Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm, the study is titled “Holding Women Back: Troubling Discoveries and Best Practices for Helping Female Leaders Succeed.”

Howard and Wellins’ work points out that despite the fact women represent more than half of all employees in the U.S. and the fact that women are graduating from high schools and colleges at a higher rate than men, they are not being promoted to high-level positions at the same rate as men. In fact, as women advance in their careers from early management to senior management, the number of women leaders drop off significantly.

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One doesn’t get to be a queen at too young an age these days (except for the exquisite Rania of Jordan, who is the beautiful exception that proves this august rule).

So, as your eyes and ears in London’s Square Mile, I find my regal self clocking up my working decades and wondering just why the world is so damnably ageist about us females of stature. There are no female TV anchors on any prime time channel much over the age of forty, and I’ve cudgelled my brains trying to find any female wielding power in the professions who hasn’t had to sacrifice what passes for ‘normal’ life to get to where she is.

If you do have a ‘career break’ and dare to pop out a baby or two, it’s quite likely that you will be able to on-ramp afterwards, and that’s encouraging, given that in the past maternity was a death knell. Today, however, you can work your proverbial butt off when you get back in to work, but it will likely not be a long-haul journey. This is where sexism loses traction to ageism: It’s as though business thinks you’re past it when you’ve only just got back on track.

Naturally I got to thinking about my own regal experience of, erm, what’s politely called ‘middle age’:

• Since I turned forty (and even I started counting backwards from then) I have done the following:
• Run a marathon (New York. Doesn’t get any better than that);
• Climbed a mountain (Kilimanjaro. Ditto).
• Launched four teenagers into secondary/tertiary education without having managed to murder a single one of them, in spite of massive provocation;
• Carried on running a smallholding in the countryside/being a mom/wife/chief cook/laundress/nanny/chauffeuse/bank of last resort for small, impecunious people;
• Fought a household bank name through the High Courts for flouting its Data Protection obligations. In person. Without legal representation;

And much, much more.

Gee. Just writing all that makes me think I wouldn’t mind a quiet life. Unsure if I’d know what to do with it, but I wouldn’t mind a bit of a try. Perhaps in the form of a nice, full-time, fulfilling, paying job? I’ve been multi-tasking for decades now, and it’s become second nature. Now I’m not being woken every night by howling offspring, I’m calmer, more energetic, and, dare I say it, wiser.

So the point is: Age shall not wither us. I am far more organised and time-efficient now than I could ever have been in my twenties and thirties. This is because I have been there and done manic work/life imbalance, usually with a small person clinging to me at the time. It teaches you phenomenal focus.

Businesses are missing a trick when they dismiss (or fail to hire) mature talent.  Look at the banks, as an example. If they’d had more mature workers who’d experienced more than one business cycle, d’you think they’d have piled all those eggs into the sub-prime basket? No. They wouldn’t. But if you look at the demographics of all the big research departments at bulge-bracket banks, I reckon the median age is thirty. Or under. Thirty-somethings are definitely spring chickens in a world where the older population is growing faster than its replacement.

This is a sexist remark: I believe women really are better at multitasking. My Consort is a brilliant analyst with a brain the size of the planet. But he can’t do more than one thing at a time without getting terribly stressed. Give him a scenario where he has to produce a report at the same time as feeding four under fives and emptying the dishwasher while de-flea-ing the dog (washing his hands included) is a recipe for meltdown.

Women just do it. Even if it means cleaning your teeth with the babe in a papoose while you sloosh out the shower and compose an article about Personal Injury Litigation all at the same time (I have done it, I promise). It teaches you to get priorities 100% ordered, and to make use of every nanosecond in every day. I know plenty managers who can’t do that…who are not hiring women ‘of a certain age’ in the numbers that you’d think they should.

So, when we multitaskers reach our post-baby years, where are we headed? We are so not ready for a rocking chair and the knitting that loomed over our grandmothers when they hit forty.

Employers should be beating a frenzied path to our doors. We aren’t going to go off and have kids all of a sudden. We’re reliable and unlikely to take sudden time off for chicken pox or the like. We’re uber-organised and hyper-efficient, and most of us have a good 20 years of decent work service still in us.

So why aren’t they clamouring for us?  I must say it puzzles me massively.

Contributed by Martin Mitchell of the Corporate Training Group

In case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:

Economic Backdrop

• Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke made his biannual speech to the House financial services committee. As he considers when to implement an increase in interest rates, he stated that the current low rates will persist for an ‘extended period’. If interest rates are increased too soon, the nascent recovery could peter out. If they are raised too late, inflation could take hold.
• Figures released on the manufacturing industry in the UK suggested that it remains deep in recession. The latest CBI quarterly survey reported that companies’ order books fell at their fastest rate in 17 years.
• This was further underlined by GDP figures for the UK that showed a 5.6% contraction in the economy in the year to June.

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