The Irish Independent reports that borrowers who face another rise in their mortgage and debt costs from today got a glimmer of hope that they may be spared further pain.

The Irish Independent also reports that some  360 manufacturing jobs were lost to cheaper overseas locations yesterday following confirmation of 280 losses at cosmetics manufacturer Procter & Gamble in Tipperary and a further 80 at electronics firm Bourns in Cork.

The Irish Times reports that Seán Quinn was among friends when he spoke yesterday morning at a business conference in his own hotel, the Slieve Russell in Co Cavan. Ten years since he last spoke at a public meeting, the tycoon drew a crowd of more than 400 to hear his reflections on life, business and innovation.

To an attendance larger than that at the annual meetings of certain quoted companies, he spoke unscripted for 45 minutes about the creation of an empire that stretches from the Border plains of Cavan and Fermanagh to east Europe, Russia and India.

Notoriously media-shy, Quinn opened by saying he failed to sit his 11-Plus exam when he was a schoolboy many decades ago. This displeased his mother but his father was not at all disturbed. "He'll be fine. He'll help me with the farm. He'll be all right."

Suffice to say that Mrs Quinn need not have worried. If her son is not now the richest man in Ireland, he certainly ranks among the wealthiest entrepreneurs. But forget farming. Addicted to diversification and the relentless drive for expansion, Seán Quinn's interests now straddle insurance, cement, hospitality, radiators, glass, plastics, property, energy, stockbroking and banking.

"We came from a very simple background and we try to make business always simple. We don't believe in too much fuss. We have never had a feasibility study done in our lives," he said.

"I don't use a mobile phone. I play cards in a house at night where you have to go out to the front street to go out to the toilet. I enjoy that. I live a very simple life. That's the way I want to continue living that life. . . It gives my brain, in my view, much more time to do what it's best at doing."

This from a man whose core company made profits last year of €432 million and whose separately managed private family interests took in profits of €200 million. In the billionaire league, steady growth in a single sector or market simply doesn't wash.

A double-digit man to the marrow, Quinn said he avoids investments with modest rates of return. "We always follow the bigger return. Some people go for safe returns. We don't like 3, 4 or 5 per cent returns."

His folksy story-telling may be akin to that of Warren Buffett, the US tycoon behind the hugely successful Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. But while legions of faithful shareholders follow the sage of Omaha with ritualistic fervour, the Ballyconnell maestro has no one to answer to but himself.

Still, he feels like spreading the wealth around. "We were too greedy for too long," he said. In future, Quinn Group will "leverage a lot of the profits towards management and staff". He did not elaborate, but such remarks will be read with interest by workers in the organisation.

Quinn's management style is designed to help people realise their own potential. "If we haven't got people to do it, we acquire them. If someone wants out, we never ask them to stay."

He has concerns about the competitiveness of the Irish economy and sees enormous opportunities in places such as India, a relatively new area of interest for him.

He thinks Irish businesspeople are world class and expresses admiration for organisations such as AIB and CRH, his biggest competitor in the cement sector. He has praise, too, for Michael O'Leary at Ryanair. Faced with such a rival in a new sector, "we would try to avoid it".

Quinn said he isn't "overly shy" but prefers to do things his own way. Of public speaking, he is circumspect. "It's been 10 years since I last did it so it'll definitely be 10 years before I do it again."

The Irish Times also reports that the Government has pledged to meet the EU target to cut by 25 per cent the administrative burden on business over the next five years.

Publishing the results of a comprehensive survey commissioned by the Department of the Taoiseach from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, said yesterday that Ireland was putting in place a new mechanism to tackle the administrative burdens arising from national legislation.

Just over half of firms - 55 per cent - consider that the overall amount of regulation is "about right", with more firms agreeing than disagreeing that the regulations are easy to understand, achieve their objectives and are appropriately enforced.

Taxation, environmental legislation, health and safety regulations and statistical returns to the Central Statistics Office were most frequently mentioned as the regulations which represented an administrative burden for firms.

Concerns over issues such as energy, taxation and banking and finance were being dealt with by the Government's White Paper on Energy, ongoing work by the Revenue Commissioners with the business community and the major consolidation of banking and financial law, said Mr Ahern.

Business lobby group Ibec welcomed the Government announcement, but said that administrative burdens are only a small part of the overall regulatory burden on business and there is a need for better thought out legislation in future.

"The costs and benefits of legislation must be analysed in advance," said Ibec's head of legal and regulatory affairs, Marie Daly.

"We need to guard against further regulatory creep and the extra costs this imposes. The best way to do this is to think twice about legislating and in many cases to make better use of the law that is already in place."

However, Ms Duffy said that Ibec was glad to see the issue moving up the political agenda both under the EU's Lisbon agenda and domestically.

"It is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed if Ireland is to continue to attract foreign direct investment and promote business here," she said.

The Irish Examiner reports that the chief executive of one of the country’s largest insurance firms has criticised attempts by the legal profession to “thwart” the activities of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB).

FBD Holdings chief executive Philip Fitzsimons says the PIAB, set up to lower the cost of settling insurance claims, is making progress and he urged the Government and consumers not to let vested interests block its work.

“The general public should have concerns, the premium paying customers should have concerns about the concerted efforts that are being made to thwart it and undermine it in its objectives.

“The consumer and general public are in favour of PIAB. The legislature are in favour of PIAB and set it up for good reason: 40% of cost of injury claims were going to legal and ancillary professions.

“The general public and Government need to make sure that whatever support PIAB needs must be delivered. They shouldn’t roll over to the legal profession,” Mr Fitzsimons said.

PIAB has been successful in reducing the cost of claims but its success at cutting legal bills has been undermined by a challenge taken by members of the legal profession to the High Court.

In January the High Court ruled the PIAB had no legal authority to deal with victims without the presence of a solicitor. Although individuals do not need legal representation when lodging a claim with the PIAB, more than half of those contacting the body have engaged solicitors.

That ruling has been appealed to the Supreme Court and the case is due to be heard soon.

Mr Fitzsimons was speaking yesterday as FBD Holdings announced a €111 million surge in pre-tax profits for 2006. The insurance group said the profits of €296m were helped by the sale of its development property in Spain and gains from investment in equity markets.

The company’s core insurance underwriting division earned premiums of €407m, a rise of 4.6%. However, earnings here were down 15.4% to €76m to due to fall in the cost of premiums.

The Financial Times reports that Japanese retail and institutional investors have continued to put money overseas in recent days, defying concerns that the global yen carry trade has been unwinding, according to fund managers and analysts in Tokyo.

The yen outflows may have helped to halt the recent appreciation of the Japanese currency, after signs that some global investors pulled out of risky assets last week and reduced their use of the carry trade – the practice of borrowing in low yielding assets, such as the yen, to buy higher-yielding assets.

The Japanese currency traded yesterday at about Y116 to the dollar in a calm market. This followed a sharp rise from Y121 to the dollar to nearly Y115 after a bout of market turbulence last week that was triggered by a fall in the Chinese stock market.

However, opinions about the future trend of the yen remain divided, since there is currently considerable disagreement about the size of the carry trade among analysts. Also, contradictory signals are emerging from different investor groups.

While many Japanese investors appear keen to continue using the carry trade, some analysts think institutional investors will continue unwinding their positions in coming weeks because they are reducing risk in other areas that are entirely unrelated to the Japanese currency. That could create opposing pressures on the yen.

Brian Garvey, senior currency strategist at State Street Global Markets in Boston, said the bank’s own recent flow data from global institutional clients, such as mutual funds, suggested that there were still large yen short positions waiting to be unwound.

“Spring cleaning of carry trades will be a major undertaking, which gives us confidence that the yen’s rally is not over,” said Mr Garvey. “Institutional investors are significantly underwater.”

Meanwhile, Kazumasa Iwata – the Bank of Japan board member who last month opposed the central bank’s interest rate rise – said in a speech yesterday that recent volatility on global markets was the result of investors “technically adjusting their positions”.

In a reference to the carry trade, he said that recent yen appreciation coupled with a retreat from risky assets “represent position adjustment [by investors who] have so far taken excessive risks”.

But Mr Iwata pointed to a swift recovery from similar market volatility last May – which also followed a tightening of BoJ policy – saying that it “fortunately did not hurt the mechanism of global or Japanese economic expansion”.

Analysts also pointed out that Japanese investors were continuing to purchase foreign assets, showing no sign of panicking over recent market turmoil. JPMorgan in Tokyo said three-quarters of the so-called carry trade – which it estimated at Y40,000bn (€261bn) – comprised a fairly stable flow of Japanese investment into foreign bonds.

Because more than 8m baby-boomers, due to receive an estimated Y50,000bn in lump sum benefits, will retire in the next three years, it expects those flows to accelerate.

Japanese interest rates are still only 0.5 per cent following last month’s 0.25 per cent rate increase. That is 300 basis points behind European rates and even lower than the UK, US and other favoured destinations of yen outflows, including the Australian and New Zealand dollar and the South African rand.

Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist for Yardeni Research, noted that the carry trade “may be a global legend, in other words, an exaggerated phenomenon”.

The FT reports that suspicious trading occurred ahead of nearly a quarter of all merger and acquisition deals on the London stock market in 2005, according to a study released on Wednesday by the UK Financial Services Authority, which adds to global regulatory concerns that illegal insider trading is widespread.

US authorities do not keep statistics in the same way, but they have expressed similar fears about insider trading. The New York Stock Exchange referred twice as many suspicious trades to US regulators for possible investigation in 2006 as it did in 2004, and federal prosecutors have recently broken up two separate trading rings that allegedly capitalised on M&A information from Wall Street banks.

The FSA study found that 23.7 per cent of takeover announcements in 2005 were preceded by share price movements that indicated possible insider trading. The number is down from a recent peak of 32.4 per cent in 2004, but little changed from the 24 per cent figure in 2000.

UK deals represent only a small fraction of global M&A activity – in 2005 they accounted for $294bn of $2,700bn in global deals, or 1.1 percent, and a similar percentage of the $3,500bn in global deals in 2006, according to statistics compiled by Thomson Financial.

“My suspicion is that we [in the United States] are worse than the British,” said Tamar Frankel, a Boston University law professor. “The more M&As you have, the more insider trading you have.” Insider traders buy or sell shares to profit from price-sensitive information about companies that has not yet been made public. It is illegal if the information is leaked in violation of a duty to keep it confidential.

US authorities regularly crack down on the problem, bringing both criminal and civil cases, including last week’s arrests of 13 people who traded on information from UBS and Morgan Stanley. Last Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission also froze $5.4m in proceeds from suspicious trading ahead of the TXU buyout announcement.

The FSA has brought only one successful enforcement case for institutional market abuse – against hedge fund manager Philippe Jabre and his employer GLG Partners.

Regulators in the US and around the globe are ramping up their efforts to detect and stop insider trading. The FSA is developing a new market monitoring system, known as Sabre 2, and it has launched a study of how information about deals is passed between banks, law firms, public relations advisers and printers. US regulators are building a database that seeks to link hedge funds and their investors with specific public companies.

Justin Urquhart Stewart, a director at Seven Investment Management, called on the FSA to do more. “It is vital for London as a leading international financial centre that we maintain our reputation and are not seen as a self-serving club where certain people get the good deal and everyone else loses out,” he said.

Retail investor representatives were troubled, but not surprised, by the findings. Roger Lawson, a director of the UK Shareholders’ Association, said: “Private shareholders are always concerned because they suspect often that institutions get the inside word before they do.”

He added that the UK regulatory regime seemed to be less strict than that in the US: “The SEC is a lot tougher. There’s still a feeling in the UK that [investors or analysts] having an informal chat with the company is okay.”

The New York Times reports that Europe prides itself on its pioneering approach to climate change — a commitment that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany aims to deepen in her term as president of the European Union.

There is just one problem: her country, home of the autobahn and the Porsche sports cars that tear along it, is among Europe’s worst offenders when it comes to cars that spew carbon dioxide into the air.

To persuade Europe to accept stringent new cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, as Mrs. Merkel plans to do at a European Union summit meeting in Brussels this week, she must also face down the German auto industry, which has, until now, done little to make its cars more climate-friendly.

German auto executives concede that they will have to do more, especially since passenger car emissions account for 12 percent of Europe’s total emissions, and are rising rather than falling, unlike overall greenhouse gases here. But the industry’s reluctance to fully embrace the fears about climate change was palpable at the International Motor Show in Geneva this week.

“We are at the moment in a hype phase, or you can say, a hysterical phase, and we have to wait until the smoke is gone,” Norbert Reithofer, the chief executive of BMW, said in an interview. “When we have all the facts on the table, we can have a realistic view about the future.”

Skepticism aside, Mr. Reithofer said BMW was already equipping its cars with new technology that made their engines burn less fuel and emit fewer gases. The public would be surprised, he said, by the reduction in emissions that BMW will achieve by the end of next year.

Still, BMW and its rivals Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Audi, will fall well short of the reductions they and other European manufacturers pledged to reach voluntarily, from 1998 to 2008.

Stung by this failure, the European Commission has proposed making those cuts mandatory by 2012. Under its plan, new cars could emit no more than 120 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer (192 grams per mile). In 2004, average emissions were 163 grams per kilometer.

“They had a long time to comply, and they didn’t do it,” said Stephan Singer, the head of the European climate and energy unit at the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels. “It tells us that voluntary agreements don’t work.”

Not all European carmakers are climate offenders. Fiat of Italy, which has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by almost a third since 1997, is not far above the 120-gram target. The French carmakers Renault and Citroën, which emphasize smaller cars, are also within striking distance.

And the Germans do make some climate-friendly cars: DaimlerChrysler showed off its Smart minicar here, which falls under the emissions cap, while BMW’s new diesel 1-series, a subcompact, comes close.

The trouble is, Germany’s auto industry derives most of its profit, not to mention its global renown, from its speedy high-performance cars. Unlike Toyota, which has turned hybrid vehicles like the Prius into a calling card, German carmakers emphasize engineering brawn.

In Geneva, for example, Audi thrilled enthusiasts with its new R8, a two-seater that has more in common with a racecar than with other Audis. Across the hall, visitors mobbed Porsche’s sports cars.

“The top speed of an average new car made by BMW, Mercedes and Audi is 235 kilometers per hour,” or 146 miles per hour, said Werner Reh, head of the transport department at Bund, a German environmental group. “If you build racing cars, you can’t really reduce consumption.”

Environmentalists argue that the simplest way to cut emissions would be to impose a speed limit equivalent to 75 miles an hour on the autobahn. Germany is the only European country that permits drivers to go as fast as their cars, or their nerves, will let them — though on limited stretches.

Yet few German politicians, even Mrs. Merkel, have come out in favor of a speed limit. To Germans, newspapers here say, a no-limit autobahn is like pasta to an Italian or a baguette to a Frenchman.

Some German auto executives predict dire consequences if the new limits become law. A strict emissions cap of 120 grams, some note, would rule out most of the models that BMW, Mercedes and Audi now produce — to say nothing of Porsche, the biggest emitter. That would have untold consequences for an industry that is one of Germany’s largest employers.

They also argue that it is unfair to penalize companies whose high-end cars may emit fewer gases, in the aggregate, than small cars.

“A Lamborghini is driven maybe 3,000 kilometers a year, while a Volkswagen Polo might be driven 30,000 kilometers a year, generating more carbon,” said Rupert Stadler, the chief executive of Audi, which, like the sports car maker Lamborghini, is part of the Volkswagen group.

In fact, the European Commission is likely to impose the limits on an average basis for Europe’s entire fleet of new cars. Under such a plan, Lamborghini could keep selling high-emitting cars, as long as Fiat sold enough low emitters to bring Europe’s average under the limit.

To achieve that, experts say, Europe could institute a trading regime like that used to limit emissions by power plants and chemical factories. Porsche, for example, could buy emissions points from a low emitter like Fiat, and pass them along to its customers in the form of a higher sticker price.

The German car industry managed to extract a compromise from Brussels. Automakers will be required to get emissions down to only 130 grams through their own technologies. The commission said they could make up the remaining 10 grams, to reach the 120-gram goal, through other efficiency measures, like greater use of biofuels.

Experts said Mrs. Merkel was unlikely to focus on cars at the Brussels meeting, instead pushing countries to accept a broader target of reducing carbon emissions by 20 percent from their 1990 levels by 2020.

For their part, German auto executives are planning to live with lower emissions, even if some say the debate is overheated.

In Geneva, the companies promoted new technologies that would make their cars more efficient. DaimlerChrysler is pushing a new generation of clean diesel engines, which it calls Bluetec. (European carmakers continue to emphasize diesel over hybrid gasoline-and-electric engines.)

BMW uses the phrase “efficient dynamics” to refer to innovations like auto start/stop, which shuts a car’s engine when it comes to a stop in a traffic jam, for example, or at a light. As soon as the driver pushes on the clutch or the gas pedal, the engine restarts.

“I don’t see BMW as a green company,” Mr. Reithofer said. “I see BMW as a very innovative company.”

The NYT also reports that hoping to shift the debate in United States-China trade relations away from currency reform and the growing American trade deficit, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said Thursday that China needed to quicken the pace of its economic reforms and do more to open its financial markets to foreign competition.

In a speech here at the Shanghai Futures Exchange, Mr. Paulson outlined a detailed set of capital market reforms that he said would help strengthen China’s sometimes volatile capital markets, bolster the country’s economy and also help rebalance the global economy.

The speech, which came on the final leg of a three-nation trip through Asia and just over a week after China’s stock markets rattled the global financial markets, also called for allowing foreign investors, including big Wall Street firms and Western financial giants, better and quicker access to China’s restricted markets.

The risks for China are greater in moving too slowly than in moving too quickly toward transparent, liquid, stable capital markets, he said.

Though the speech did not contain any new points, it was significant because it reflected the mounting tensions in the United States-China relationship. It was the third time in six months that the Treasury secretary has traveled to China to press the leadership to open up its economy, a highly unusual display of American pressure.

The Bush administration effort so far has yielded few results, despite growing fear at the Treasury Department that if China does not take steps soon there will be legislation requiring economic retaliation against China in Congress.

Shortly after taking office last summer, Mr. Paulson vowed to step up the pressure on China by establishing a “strategic economic dialogue” between high-level officials in both countries. In December, Mr. Paulson headed a delegation of administration cabinet members, along with Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, to urge China to open its economy and in particular to allow its currency, the yuan, to appreciate in value.

A yuan appreciation would, many economists say, ease the American trade deficit with China by making Chinese exports to the United States more expensive and American exports to China cheaper.

Though many analysts doubt that China will allow the yuan to appreciate rapidly or that such an appreciation would make a substantial dent in the deficit in the next few years, there has been growing frustration over the trade deficit. The Bush administration and Congress are hoping that China can move more quickly on economic and financial reform that could set the stage for more balanced trade between the two countries.

Last year, China reported a $177 billion trade surplus with the rest of the world, mostly with the United States and Europe.

Mr. Paulson stopped in Beijing Wednesday and met with his counterpart in the strategic dialogue, the vice prime minister, Wu Yi, amid indications from the Bush administration that Mr. Paulson was trying to impress on the Chinese leadership the importance of taking concrete steps to ease economic tensions before May.

The May deadline is seen by administration officials as important because Ms. Wu is to lead a high-level delegation of Chinese officials to Washington as a counterpoint to Mr. Paulson’s visit in December.