For this week’s column in the FT, I have gone down memory lane to the origins of the disastrous UBS foray into credit derivatives and subprime mortgages. You can read it here and comment below.

These are hard times for the old guard of A&R men at music companies who have clung on to power and perks for decades.

The greatest of them all, since the death of Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, is 76-year-old Clive Davis, who has just been removed as the chairman of the BMG Label Group at Sony BMG.

Mr Davis still has a touch: he signed Leona Lewis, the British singer, who has just topped the US album charts. But he did not exactly discover her in a smokey club - she was a winner of the X Factor television talent show in the UK.

Talent shows and internet social networks such as MySpace have become a bigger force in promoting new singers than the old-fashioned route of being discovered in said club by an A&R man.

That raises the question, which clearly occurred to Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, the overall head of SonyBMG, of why Mr Davis was being paid an estimated $10m a year in a shrinking industry in which all the old verities are being challenged.

It seems that Guy Hands, who now owns EMI Group (and perhaps wishes that he did not) is not the only one who doubts whether so many A&R men are needed, or must be paid so well. He has just appointed a new head of A&R for EMI.

As I wrote the other day, talent-spotters are still needed in music companies. But the days of the highly-paid, self-indulgent A&R person who styled himself as the star of the show, are over.

Mr Davis, it seems, finally overstayed his welcome.

Update: Oh dear, sorry. I’m going to be on leave for another week so will not be back on duty until Monday April 14.  Apologies.

I am taking some leave and will not be back at work until Monday April 7 so I do not plan to post again until then, unless something unusual happens. Have a good time without me.

Greg Mankiw is right about this. I can’t remember much from my university philosophical logic classes but I do know that minus A implies minus B does not prove that A implies B.

My colleague Martin Wolf has addressed the guilty plea of the NatWest Three to wire fraud, possibly in return for serving jail sentences in Britain, with a spendidly coruscating attack on the plea bargaining in the US judicial system.

I have nothing to add but I am intrigued by the notion of wire fraud, which crops up all the time in US white-collar crime cases such as the recent conviction of Conrad Black. It has always seemed odd to me that the US treats wire fraud and mail fraud as separate offences from fraud itself, as if the method by which the crime is committed trumps the crime itself.

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There is an economic phenomenon known as “asymmetrical information”, which occurs when one party to a transaction has more information than the other.

I experienced an extreme version of this, although one that was eventually corrected, in the carpet souk in Abu Dhabi this weekend.

Having spent most of last week in Dubai and having a couple of days to kill before today’s FT/DIFC conference, I decided to drive down to Abu Dhabi to take a look at the largest emirate of the United Arab Emirates.

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There are so few companies that manage their branding, their marketing and their sales adeptly that those that deserve recognition.

The best example I have found recently is an unusual case - Steinway, the US piano maker that still builds its finest instruments by hand in Queens, New York and sells them from its grand showroom on 57th Avenue in Manhattan.

Seeking  to buy a piano, I discovered that Steinway offers not only an alluring sales experience but also a carefully stratified set of brands and an accessible way to try out a piano at home before buying it. There are a lot of consumer brands that seek to do the same thing but fail.

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