Which names do you remember from the Beijing Olympics? The Mansfield Mermaid Rebecca Adlington? The cyclists Chris Hoy or Rebecca Romero? Manulife? Atos Origin? The last two did not win gold, they spent it, but if their names have passed you by, their £50m sponsorship looks like money badly spent.

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Malcolm Walker, the cheeky chappy of retail, has got Woolworths into a right pick and mix in the past week.

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In 1909, when the American owners of Woolworths opened their first British store in Liverpool, the local newspaper, The Liverpool Courier, reported long queues outside, with shelves stripped bare of their goods before the first day of trading.

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5.15am

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Investors with shares in Protherics, the UK biotech group that specialises in cancer and critical care treatments, have struck gold.

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It is because of Iraq that John McCain and Barack Obama are fighting for the US presidency. Both candidates were, in very different ways, defined by their positions on the war – McCain as the national security champion, Obama as the one Democrat who had the courage to say no.

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Some City analysts wrote off Woolworths as a lost cause a long time ago. But Malcolm Walker, chief executive of the frozen food specialist Iceland, and Baugur, the Icelandic retail investment group, clearly have not, and this weekend it emerged that they had made an offer to purchase Woolworths' retail division. Woolworths rejected the offer yesterday.

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When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story about several young religious militants from Lebanon who changed their view of Western culture through Facebook friendships. The subtext to the tale is that free expression of ideas, enabled by the web, bridges deep cultural divides.

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The first stop a new British officer used to make after stepping on to Indian soil was the Bombay branch of the Army and Navy store – the British Empire's outfitter of choice. Nowadays the grand Italianate building where it was located, splendidly restored, is once again a department store: the flagship of Tata Trent's Westside chain.

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Monaco's casino and wedding-cake-style hotels group Société des Bains de Mer is defying the gloom and looking to open luxury hotels in London and Paris as part of a big international expansion programme over the next few years.

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Bull markets create their fair share of geniuses but the bear is an altogether different beast. Correctly predicting that financial stocks were set for meltdown enabled Crispin Odey, a veteran City hedge fund manager, to pay himself a near- £28m bonus earlier this year.

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What's to be done about the worrying trend of increasing home repossessions? Mortgage lenders were quick yesterday to point out that a 24 per cent rise in repossession orders does not necessarily mean all those people will leave their homes – a good proportion will resolve their cases before it comes to that. But thereis mounting evidence that repossession is becoming a really big problem once again.

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As benchmarks go, it's not the toughest. Bradford & Bingley hopes that its rights issue, concluded yesterday, will prove to have been more successful than the disastrous fundraising conducted earlier this year by HBOS. To remind you, it managed to persuade just over 8 per cent of shareholders to subscribe for their rights, and B&B will regard anything better as a success.

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Business groups such as the CBI have given the Treasury a tough time this year over the taxation of multinational companies. Richard Lambert, the organisation's director-general, has repeatedly warned that more companies will choose to move their tax base elsewhere if the Government presses ahead with reforms of the way in which overseas profits are taxed. Let's hope then, that Mr Lambert will be equally quick to congratulate the Exchequer for the munificent rules that look likely to enable the investment bank Merrill Lynch to avoid paying any UK tax for many decades to come.

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For Bear Stearns, the end came with a sonic boom. With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, there has been a "dead man walking" hush since the Treasury stepped in to prevent their collapse. But for another of the major institutional victims of the credit crisis, we may be only at the start of a slow death.

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As Russian and Georgian soldiers were flinging explosive artillery shells at each other, both sides in the South Ossetia conflict were also exploiting the very latest in cyber aggression, using techniques honed by professional gangsters specialising in online crime.

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Few expect the platinum producer Lonmin to escape the clutches of Xstrata, which last week stormed through its front door with a hostile £5bn takeover bid.

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In the jungle of the City, there is a new king. The big beasts of the banking world are wounded and the equity fund managers are now reasserting their power.

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