A newspaper’s job (among other things) is to tell you about things of which you have never heard. So hats off to the FT Brussels bureau for its revelation (to me) that the US and Europe are about to agree on trading standards for biofuels to allow Jatropha into Europe.

Jatropha is, apparently, a plant that grows in India and elsewhere and was once used to treat malaria. It is well-suited to biofuels since it has a high yield, grows easily on scrubland and is not a foodstuff.

The FT even provided a photograph (in print) of a Jatropha and a potted history of it, so to speak. I found it very enlightening.

Time once again to revist my list of bank CEOs at risk.

Of the three I originally listed - Chuck Prince of Citigroup, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns and Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch - we have already lost Mr O’Neal.

This has been a bad week too for Mr Cayne, who was the subject of an engrossing story in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that suggested he not only spent a lot of time on the golf course and a\t the bridge table during the summer turmoil but he also has a penchant for smoking dope (which he denies).

As the week ends, the pressure is also growing on Mr Prince. Deteriorating conditions in the structured credit market mean that Citi is likely to have to mark down further its holdings of collateralised debt obligations. News has just broken that it will hold an emergency board meeting this week.

Are we heading for a trifecta of resignations?

Column on the Financial Times comment page

Google is a very big company: its share price broke $700 on Wednesday. It has a market capitalisation of more than $200bn and its revenues are higher than those of AOL, MSN and Yahoo combined. Google has also been known to throw its weight around in a self-interested manner: its attitudes to privacy and copyright infringement are dubious.

But, in the world of mobile phones, Google is an upstart with an agenda that could not only help the company itself but the public as a whole. It wants to break open a closed world built by mobile network operators – particularly those in the US – to protect themselves from competition and consumer choice.

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Book review on Financial Times Business Life page

How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves – From the Board to the Boardroom
By Garry Kasparov

Amazon US; Amazon UK

The notion that business is like war is not new. Sun Tzu’s Art of War pops up on many a corporate leader’s bookshelf, with its gnomic lessons on how to defeat an enemy.

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, has a similar rationale in this book. His point is that a game of battle, strategy and tactics aimed at defeating a single opponent can teach us about business and politics.

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