Orlando Hamilton’s flower shop is not the kind of place you expect to be struck by an impending sense of doom. It is sweet and fragrant, crammed with exotic plants, elaborate arrangements and buckets of flowers spilling into the street. But when I stopped by to pick up a couple of bunches of hyacinths the other day, there was a sense of frenzy in the Ladbroke Grove florist. Orlando Hamilton had just been asked to arrange 6,000 red roses, which were being flown in for a single evening at the Dorchester hotel, which was hosting the launch of a new, limited-edition perfume that costs £64,000 a bottle.

The whole thing sounded so absurdly extravagant that, walking out of the shop, you couldn’t help but wonder: is this a sign that we have reached the top of the market?

The anecdotal evidence of overconfidence seems to be almost everywhere. There is alarming talk once again of paradigm shifts in the economy and the start of a new supercycle in some of the commodities markets.

In so many asset classes and in every area of human indulgence, there are worrying signs that people have lost sight of the meaning of money. These are typically signs to sell.

To be sure, many of the people who are warning that the market is poised for collapse were saying the same thing a year ago. And the year before that. Corporate earnings are robust. US growth may have slipped, but that has been more than compensated for by China and surging economies elsewhere. The macro-economic outlook is sanguine, too: growth may slow, but it is not expected to fall. It’s tempting to dismiss the pessimists as the kind of people who have, as the economist Paul Samuelson put it, “predicted nine of the last five recessions”.

But markets and businesses trade on confidence. There are reasons for uncertainty – interest rates have risen sharply in a short time and the impact of higher borrowing costs is only just beginning to feed through; the housing market, transformed by the buy-to-let boom, is in new territory in terms of the price of homes compared with the incomes of buyers; the complexity and volume of derivatives and debt syndication are making it harder to predict where the pressure points will be in a slowdown; and China’s recent growth has been rapid but unstable, marked by higher inflation and asset bubbles.

Next week, The Times will look at the economy, the property market, the stock market, the M&A frenzy and the retail business and try to weigh up the evidence. Are the bulls naive or the doomsayers simply misguided? After all, it may just be that the economy is blooming.

Taking measure of the internet

For every single song downloaded legally, it is estimated that there are 40 bootlegged versions copied digitally. It is little wonder that many in the music industry are in despair. And it is hardly surprising that iTunes, the Apple music service, has embedded personal information into music files that are bought from its online store.

Just a week after Google signalled its eagerness to compile personal information culled from the searches of its users, Apple appears to be compromising privacy in the name of profit. And, to many people who have chafed against the overweening power of the incumbent IT companies, Microsoft and IBM, these insurgents – Google and Apple – were supposed to be the good guys.

The reality, though, is a little more complex, if not technical.

Google’s claims to be holier than thou – to forswear evil – will indeed be tested by its decision to add a fresh revenue stream, namely the collation and distribution of the personal information of users.

By contrast, Apple’s decision to embed personal information in music files should not tarnish its consumer-friendly image. There may be many problems with iTunes, which are associated with its dominance of the music download business: the choice is limited, the iTunes store is frustrating for users. But the decision to make iTunes music traceable will instil at least a modicum of confidence among the music companies and make it more likely that they put their catalogues online. In this sense, this is not an invasion of privacy as much as it is a quid pro quo for more music on the web.

But there is a broader issue at play here. The internet, in its second incarnation, is being defined by the return path. In the first dot-com boom, the revolution was the choice made available by companies to consumers online. In this second wave, it is what companies are able to learn about consumers – in everything from their music downloads to their web searches to their online purchases to their blog comments to the stories read online – that is transforming business.

For the first time, it is all measurable.

Posh but real

Simon Fuller may be the man who helped to bring us the Spice Girls, and who helps to prop up the career of Victoria Beckham. Yet, despite these contributions to high culture, his business achievements should be celebrated. Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, the operation he runs, earned $28 million in operating profit last year, generating the lion’s share of profit and revenue to US parent company CKX – helped a little by brand Beckham but principally through owning the rights to the Idol format worldwide.

Fuller sold out to CKX two years ago, getting the best part of £84 million, but he was left with a salary of £846,000 and a small shareholding. It clearly wasn’t easy to go from running his own show to a mere subsidiary, so it’s hardly surprising that he wants to take CKX private in conjunction with controlling investor Robert Sillerman. The $1.33 billion offer has a decent enough 29 per cent premium, and Fuller has to put his neck on the line by putting cash back in, as he should. It may not be mining, manufacturing or metallurgy, but this is the 21st century, and Fuller’s skill at the alchemy of creating celebrity has an enduring value. It may only be show business, but it is real business nevertheless. He has, in that famous phrase, got beyond the tinsel to the real tinsel: a capitalist idol.

It’s as if there is a touch of the Major Barbara to Sir Crispin Davis. Like Shaw’s Salvation Army officer, the Reed Elsevier chief executive has decided to cut historic ties with the armaments industry. In his case, it was not so much an antiwar statement as a pro-profit sentiment. He has listened not to his critics but to his customers and his authors. His core constituency operates in the front lines of healthcare, not war.

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