The Irish Independent says move aside Enda and Pat, Bertie is back in town.

The Irish Independent also says that if there was any doubt about the ability of the current Aer Lingus management team to tackle work practices which would seem unusual in any other workplace, they were laid to rest yesterday.

The Irish Times reports that Pfizer's Irish operations appear to have escaped the massive jobs cuts announced by the global drugs giant yesterday as it aimed to slash annual costs by $2 billion.

The company said it was cutting 10,000 jobs or about 10 per cent of its total worldwide workforce by the end of next year. This includes the 2,200 US sales jobs reductions announced at the end of last year.

In Europe, Pfizer said it would take steps to streamline its operations, with a proposed reduction to its European field force by more than 20 per cent, subject to consultation with works councils and local labour law. It is unclear if any sales jobs will go at Pfizer's consumer healthcare Ireland subsidiary, which is responsible for the sales and marketing of over-the-counter medicines, oral hygiene and skincare products.

Pfizer is to close two manufacturing sites in New York and Nebraska and plans to sell a third site in Feucht, Germany. From 2003 to 2008, it will have reduced its network of manufacturing plants worldwide from 93 to 48, including the sites announced yesterday.

The company is planning to close three research sites in the US and is proposing to close research sites in Nagoya, Japan, and Amboise, France.

However, despite escaping yesterday's announced cuts, the Irish operations in Dublin and Cork are still under review.

"Our position in Ireland is we have an ongoing review of manufacturing operations but it is not yet complete," a spokeswoman said.

Pfizer employs about 2,000 people here. As well as its six manufacturing plants, the US pharmaceutical giant it also runs a Dublin treasury centre, providing treasury and in-house banking services to Pfizer affiliates worldwide, and Pfizer International Bank Europe, both based in Dublin's International Financial Services Centre. It also has a European financial share services centre which is based in Dublin.

It had been expected that Ireland would share in the cost-cutting. Pfizer's Loughbeg and Little Island plants in Cork are involved in the manufacture of anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor. While it is the world's best-selling drug, its patent is due to expire in 2011, allowing generic manufacturers to produce rival drugs at lower cost.

At the end of last year Pfizer stopped development of Torcetrapib, a cholesterol treatment drug that was to replace Lipitor. The replacement drug, which many were anticipating to be a major earner, was expected to have been manufactured in Cork.

Pfizer shares have suffered on concerns about the generic threat to Lipitor and other key drugs.

The cuts come as Pfizer said quarterly profit more than tripled on the sale of its consumer health business, although revenue was flat amid lower sales of Lipitor and generic competition for several medicines.

The Irish Times also reports that the property market is undergoing "significant cooling" as house buyers become much more cautious about property values, a new survey of the housing market revealed yesterday.

In its latest Housing Market Outlook, Irish Intercontinental Bank (IIB) predicts that house prices will stabilise and growth resume later this year in line with the economy.

However, IIB said yesterday that the Government had mishandled the property market.

Compared to an estimated 12 per cent last year, the IIB predicts house prices to rise by 5 per cent this year. Added factors behind the slowdown included increased housing supply and the reversal of excessive expectations concerning house prices.

These combined to dampen prices late last year, according to chief economist Austin Hughes.

"We had the stamp duty fiasco. When we gave our outlook last August we said the main risk then was of a government mishandling of the market and that's what we have had," he said.

"The market is in transition. Towards the end of 2006, a combination of factors such as rapidly rising borrowing costs and uncertainty about stamp duty meant this process was not as smooth as might have been expected," chief executive of IIB Homeloans Tom Foley said yesterday.

Survey analysis suggests that house price levels are currently mostly justified by higher after- tax incomes, higher employment and migration and lower interest rates. While ruling out any collapse in the market, Mr Hughes said that prices would continue to experience a "correction" as buyer sentiment continued to moderate.

Only 12 per cent of survey respondents expect house prices to increase "a lot", compared with 34 per cent expecting such an increase in February 2006. Some 31 per cent expect house prices to remain unchanged, compared to only 14.5 per cent of respondents to last year's survey.

The share of respondents expecting prices to fall "a little" has risen from 3.6 per cent last year to 11 per cent.

However, the numbers expecting a major fall remains an extremely low 1 per cent.

"Consumers have wised up. They expect that the property market will not do an awful lot this year, but they are still positive . . . the underlying demand for housing remains strong with strong population and employment growth underscored by record levels of inward migration," Mr Hughes said.

According to the IIB, European Central Bank (ECB) interest rates will rise by one quarter of 1 per cent in March, but Mr Hughes said falls in oil prices had reduced the case for any subsequent falls.

"Fortuitously, it seems the timing of the ECB interest rate cycle could be ideally suited to the Irish property market. Borrowing costs are set to peak when spending power is at its strongest."

The Irish Examiner reports that Irish Nationwide Building Society has yet to name the advisers it wants to handle the sale of its €1.5 billion mortgage and property lending business.

It had been expected to do so before the end of November, but the society is believed to be deep in the process of getting all of the back office work finalised before it can proceed with the sale.

To date NCB Corporate Finance were rumoured to be the front runners to become corporate advisers to the building society in the face of stiff competition from domestic and overseas financiers.

But it is understood that the society is fully engaged in getting all of the necessary paper work in order to satisfy potential buyers of the business.

However the delay in appointing advisers suggests the preparatory work has taken longer than observers expected.

It is believed the sale will be finalised before the year end with windfalls of up to €15,000 due to find their way into the pockets of d Irish Nationwide stakeholders.

The sale could net chiefexecutive, Michael Fingleton, €15 million.

However with the property market showing signs of slowing the price tag of €1.5bn could start to look high if the outlook for construction was to worsen significantly in the coming months.

The Financial Times reports that the the US economy last year recorded its lowest rate of labour productivity growth in more than a decade, with growth in output per hour worked falling behind the EU and Japan. The fall casts further doubt on the ability of the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates as the US economy slows.

Research to be published on Tuesday by the Conference Board, the international business organisation, shows that US labour productivity in the whole economy grew by 1.4 per cent in 2006 as slower economic growth was combined with a rapid rise in employment.

Gail Fosler, the chief economist of the Conference Board, told the Financial Times that the fall in productivity growth was unlikely to be cyclical and the result of weaker gains in services’ industries, raising “concerns about the long-lasting productivity impact of information and communications technology”.

If weak productivity growth continues, she said, “even in a slow growth environment, the US economy will be performing close to its potential”, restricting the Fed’s ability to cut interest rates.

Better economic figures released this year, alongside emerging signs of a slowdown in US economic potential, has led to tumbling market expectations of a rate cut in recent weeks. Investors now believe that there is only about a 10 per cent chance of a reduction in official interest rates by the May meeting of the Fed’s interest rate-setting committee, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The US slowdown in whole economy productivity growth over the past three years - to a rate half that in 2002 and 2003 - contrasts with rising productivity growth in Japan, on the back of a surge in manufacturing exports on the Conference Board’s internationally comparable figures.

Japan’s labour productivity grew by 2.5 per cent in 2006 as manufacturing companies took advantage of new demand from China in addition to its traditional export destinations.

Europe improved its productivity performance considerably last year as it enjoyed its first year of strong economic growth since 2000. However, the improvement in Nordic countries and Germany masked continued weakness in southern Europe, where growth was generated by surging employment rather than an improvement in the efficiency of the economies of Spain, Italy and Portugal.

The Conference Board recorded that productivity growth remained extremely high in emerging countries of China, India and Eastern Europe, as inefficient companies fell away and huge numbers of workers moved from relatively inefficient sectors such as agriculture to manufacturing.

China recorded 9.5 per cent productivity growth in 2006, while India achieved 6.9 per cent and the 12 new EU member states achieved 4.1 per cent growth.

The FT also reports that Nicolas Sarkozy, the flagbearer of France’s Gaullist right, on Monday promised a “real economic revolution” if he won the presidential elections in May by offering employees new tax incentives to earn more money by working longer hours.

In an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Mr Sarkozy said his “priority of priorities” was to restore the value of work and lift France’s sluggish economic growth rate. “France’s moral crisis carries a name: it is the crisis of work,” he said.

“Why have we had an economic growth rate 1 per centage point below that in the better-performing of the free countries over the past 15 years? Because salaries are too low, social charges are too heavy, the fiscal pressure is too high.”

Fleshing out his economic programme, Mr Sarkozy said he wanted to reduce the size state, loosen the 35-hour working week – a flagship policy of a past Socialist government – and make stock options available to “everyone or no one”.

As a means of boosting consumer spending by leaving more money in employees’ pockets, he proposed a cut of 4 percentage points in taxes and social charges – to match the European average – handing back €68bn (£44.7bn, $88.1bn) to the French people, or €2,000 per household a year.

He also suggested that 95 per cent of people would be exempted from inheritance tax, enabling parents to leave more financial assets to their children.

The current frontrunner in the opinion polls has shied away from any vows to scrap the 35-hour working week. But he promised yesterday that employees who agreed to work more than 35 hours a week would not have on Monday pay tax on those additional hours while their employers would remain exempt from supplementary social charges. An employee earning the minimum salary could make an additional €2,000 a year by working an extra four hours a week. The state could also gain by reaping indirect taxes on the resulting increases in consumer spending.

The interior minister said his tax cuts could be partly financed by reducing state spending. The cost of salaries and pensions for civil servants, he said, accounted for 45 per cent of the government’s budget. He added that only one out of every two civil servants who retired should be replaced.

Since being selected as the ruling UMP’s presidential candidate on January 14, Mr Sarkozy has dominated the news agenda leaving Ségolène Royal, the Socialist party contender, scrambling. However, Ms Royal, who is still in the “listening” phase of her campaign, has promised to spell out more of her policy ideas on February 11.

In spite of being strongly backed by France’s corporate bosses, Mr Sarkozy on Monday criticised the granting of unmerited stock options and “golden parachutes”. “I do not like the idea of stock options for a small group of top directors. I am very tempted by the idea of stock options for everyone or no one,” he said.

“But big salaries do not shock me on condition that they are associated with real risk. To take an example, Patrick Kron, who has turned Alstom around, deserves a big salary. His predecessor did not deserve a golden parachute.”

The New York Times reports that the Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol industry’s major lobbyist, works out of cramped offices that it shares with a lawyer near Capitol Hill. Pictures of ethanol plants from its 61 board members hang everywhere. “We’re about to run out of wall space,” said Bob Dinneen, the association’s president.

The association may only have six staff members but it is now bursting with energy, a far cry from the early days when its founder, a South Dakota farm boy who was convinced America needed to break the stranglehold of foreign oil, quit in frustration after four years.

After three decades of surviving mostly on tax subsidies, the industry is poised tonight to get its biggest endorsement from on high that it has a long-term future as a home-grown alternative to gasoline.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush is expected to call for a huge increase in the amount of ethanol that refiners mix with gasoline, probably double the current goal of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.

While the details of the proposal are not known, 15 billion gallons of ethanol would work out to more than 10 percent of the country’s current gasoline consumption, and is far beyond the current capacity of about 5.4 billion gallons.

At least half of the new ethanol would come from corn, signaling the administration’s support to the Midwest farm states that have benefited the most from the recent ethanol boom.

For an industry once dominated by the will of a single powerful producer, Archer Daniels Midland, ethanol has come a long way, joining the oil industry and producers of major agricultural commodities as an entrenched political force in Washington. And it now enjoys a powerful role in presidential politics because of Iowa’s status as one of the first states to select delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions.

But with dozens of new ethanol plants coming online this year, the ethanol lobby is facing a critical point. The political reality is that corn’s days as the chief crop for making the fuel may be numbered.

Corn-based ethanol can only marginally reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But it does little, if anything, to improve energy efficiency, and the mounting concern of some politicians is that relying on corn is leading to collateral damage in other parts of the agricultural economy and threatening the nation’s status as the leading corn exporter. The big increase in the works may mean consumers would end up paying more at the supermarket.

So the ethanol lobby and its political supporters now face the challenge of trying to maintain the momentum of ethanol’s feel-good story before the potential negative consequences of the rapid ramp-up become all too apparent.

Clutching the reins these last five years is Mr. Dinneen, a longtime Washington lobbyist who joined the association in 1988. He recalled his early years there as a pitched war with the oil industry. “I would wake up in the morning and try to think of a way to vilify the oil guys,” he said.

Today, to keep the ethanol train moving, ethanol makers are cozying up to the oil industry, forming political alliances and enlisting executives from companies like Chevron as they race to make a quicker transition to cellulosic ethanol made from nonfood crops, like switchgrass.

Otherwise, public support could turn against the fuel, which yields a third less energy than petroleum-based gasoline and still relies on a federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to remain competitive.

“We are no longer debating whether this makes sense, if this public policy should be pursued,” Mr. Dinneen said. “The discourse now is how much ethanol can we produce, how quickly can we produce it and what is the pathway for greater production of domestic renewables.”

That pathway, at the moment, relies on commercializing cellulosic ethanol made from crops like switchgrass or wood chips, which today is twice as expensive to produce as ethanol made from corn.

Some analysts, though, believe that politics has already trumped economics. “Once we have a corn-based technology up and running the political system will protect it,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, a board member at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “We cannot afford to have 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in 2015, and that’s exactly where we are headed.”

Mr. Goldstein said that rather than speed up the process of producing more ethanol, Congress should “step back and reflect on the damage we have already done.”

By contrast, ethanol advocates in Congress are pushing to accelerate research into cellulosic sources with the stated goal of speeding the timetable for when corn can be supplemented — or supplanted — as the chief ethanol crop.

“We need additional funds for transitioning to making more energy crops for our national security,” Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and the new chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in an interview earlier this month.”

The agriculture secretary, Mike Johanns, said there will be an “adjustment period“ for ethanol that will last a few years. But he is confident that more corn will emerge to ease the pain of higher grain prices, as seed companies improve yields and farmers shift their acreage from other crops. “When you look at the whole constellation of issues, and advancements that are out there, it is a very encouraging time for agriculture,” Mr. Johanns said in an interview.

The race to crack the code to produce cellulosic ethanol more efficiently has attracted dozens of researchers, venture capitalists and even the interest of major oil companies like BP and Chevron. Vinod Khosla, a major venture capitalist who has poured money into seven different start-up companies, has been pushing Washington lawmakers to set more aggressive targets to ensure that the demand for corn moves beyond corn. “If I am going to take the risk, the market has to be big,” Mr. Khosla said.

The Renewable Fuels Association is trying to balance the competing concerns. The organization was not always interested in rapid expansion, particularly if that meant allowing competition for A.D.M. from sources like Brazilian sugar. David Hallberg, the association’s founding president, said he left after four years in the job partly because he grew tired of disputes with A.D.M. executives over the future direction of the industry.

“I thought my job was to grow the industry to be as large as it could be,“ said Mr. Hallberg, who denied he was forced out. “That isn’t what our bigger members always wanted.”

By the time Mr. Hallberg left the organization in 1985, oil prices had plummeted to $9 a barrel, making ethanol uneconomic as a fuel. The industry turned its efforts toward selling ethanol as an oxygen enhancer for gasoline that could lift octane and reduce carbon monoxide.

With the influence of Dwayne O. Andreas, A.D.M.’s longtime chief executive and now chairman emeritus, Congress passed the federal excise tax in 1978 that gave ethanol its primary subsidy, a credit worth 51 cents per gallon of ethanol, or $21 per barrel of oil. Mr. Andreas had powerful friends in Congress, including Senator Robert J. Dole, a Republican from Kansas who rose to majority leader and who pushed consistently over the years to retain the ethanol subsidy.

In those early days the influence of Mr. Andreas and A.D.M.’s generous contributions to both Republicans and Democrats kept ethanol alive. The company also held greater sway within the organization because of its great weight as an ethanol producer. Even today, at around 25 percent of total ethanol capacity, A.D.M. remains the largest maker.

At first, the ethanol producers had few allies. The National Corn Growers Association was agnostic about ethanol at best, and the American Farm Bureau opposed ethanol, worrying that it could raise the price of livestock feed and cut into exports, Mr. Hallberg said.

That began to change in the late 1980s when the groups began to work together to supply ethanol to some 30 cities as a gasoline additive in the winter months. Those months were also when A.D.M.’s wet mill corn processing plants made more ethanol.

While the ethanol and corn forces preferred their wintertime plan, they later threw their support behind a federal proposal to implement a reformulated gasoline with an “oxygenate” — either ethanol or methyl tertiary-butyl ether — in nine of the country’s smoggiest cities. The program took effect in 1995.

Ethanol’s big breakthrough came over the battle to ban M.T.B.E. After gasoline spills in California revealed that M.T.B.E. could corrode groundwater, the Renewable Fuels Association and the corn growers were among those pushing ethanol as an environmentally safer alternative.

California banned M.T.B.E. in 1999 and requested a waiver from the federal oxygenate standard, arguing it could make a cleaner-burning gasoline without ethanol. President Bush rejected the waiver, spurring an ethanol construction miniboom.

In 2001, Mr. Dinneen took over as president, focused on reaching détente with the oil industry. To win approval for the renewable fuels standard, he eventually cobbled together an unlikely coalition of consumer groups, the American Petroleum Institute and environmentalists like the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The fuel standard Congress approved in 2005, which called for a ramp-up of ethanol use to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, ended up lighting a fire under the industry. When oil prices shot over $50 a barrel, ethanol became profitable, and then President Bush set off an industry building boom when he said last January that “America is addicted to oil.”

It helped that the mix of ethanol’s advocates had been changing. About a decade ago farmers began investing in ethanol plants; today more than half of the 110 ethanol plants in production are at least partly owned by farmers. The ownership by farmers brought home the rural benefits of the ethanol industry more directly.

The association’s expanding board, which is 10 times the size it was some 20 years ago, has also become more diverse and less beholden to the business agendas of its biggest members.

As ethanol expands, Mr. Dinneen dismissed the concerns of some economists that its explosive growth could threaten exports and livestock prices, and that a potential investment bubble could burst before cellulosic ethanol has a chance to hit the market.

“I don’t get all that worried that we are building too fast,” he said. “I am not bright enough or foolish enough to try to control the market.”

The NYT also reports that as even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit.

The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales.

For the major recording companies, however, selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music.

Until last year, the industry was counting on online purchases of music, led by Apple’s iTunes music store, to make up the difference.

But digital sales in 2006, while 80 percent ahead of the year before, grew slower than in 2005 and did not compensate for the decline in physical sales, according to an industry report released in London last week.

Even so, the move to MP3s is not inevitable, some insiders warn.

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

Experiments by Yahoo — last year it offered a handful of tracks from Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson, Jesse McCartney and Relient K without any digital restrictions — will continue this year, David Goldberg, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, said in an interview at Midem. Two of the major labels, Sony BMG and EMI, agreed to the tests in 2006.

In a handful of European countries, especially in France, consumer frustration has led to government proposals to legislate interoperability.

“There is a groundswell, and I say that on the basis of private conversations,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which sells digital music protected against piracy through the Rhapsody subscription service.

“It will happen between next year and five years from now, but it is more likely to be in one to two years,” he said.