Fru Hazlitt, chief executive of GCap, has been musing on the three months she spent heading a quoted company, ending with the initially unwelcome takeover from Charles Allen's Global Radio.

Hazlitt says the resulting publicity was out of all proportion to the small company she was running. “I will think very carefully about being in a public company again.”

Fru, you got off lightly. These things normally take for ever. Sainsbury's was in play for most of last year, and wasn't even taken over in the end.

And an odd irony emerges. Guardian Media Group fell out with Global late last year over some complicated contractual deal and sniffily decamped to GCap. After the takeover, they will end up with Global again.

“We expect our sales arrangements to stay as they are, and have every expectation of a positive relationship with GCap's new owners,” the company tells me by e-mail. And, quite possibly, through clenched teeth.

Blindingly clever

Hold the front page! A piece of research appears from Goldman Sachs. The writer is cautious on UK banks - apparently there are two problems, one structural, one cyclical. (Oh, really?) So he is adjusting the price targets.

Barclays goes from 400p to 404p. HBOS drops from 752p to 748p, but goes from “neutral” to “buy”. Alliance & Leicester rises from 455p to 458p. And so on.

All this is reported, with due reverence, by Reuters, complete with screaming headlines.

Attempts to obtain from Goldmans some rational explanation of how this insane micro-management of price targets in some way helps investors to make a rational choice fail to bear fruit.

But they are terribly clever people, you know.

Desperate measures

Two Americas face up to the recession: as fuel prices soar, a new crime emerges. Thieves in Kansas City have taken to using power drills to make holes in petrol tanks.

Rather carefully, one would imagine. How desperate do you have to be?

Meanwhile, website Bark Avenue is offering a range of doggie beds, prices up to $700 each for false mink. Seven hundred dollars for a dog blanket? One model comes for a mere $289, but the pillow is extra. Barking.

Tongue in cheek

A delightful hostage to fortune arrives. The Investor Relations Society, the trade body for oily corporate spin-doctors, is having a competition for excellence in company communications.

The shortlist will be announced in October and the winner at the end of November.

A long way off. Will any of our much-admired banks, extracting information from which on their true financial status today is like pulling teeth, make the shortlist?

And how many on that list will still be standing by October?

The spirit of corporate disclosure is clearly alive and well in Munich, where the German state bank BayernLB is the latest to unveil squillions of write-offs.

The bank said that Gerhard Gribkowsky, its chief risk officer, had been dismissed “with immediate effect”.

“The bank did not disclose a reason for the decision,” the wire services report solemnly.

However, “according to media reports”, his abrupt defenestration “is connected to the large portfolio writedowns at the bank”.

Surely not?

Colourful to the end

The notice appears for the memorial service for Sir John Harvey-Jones, the flamboyant former ICI boss, at Hereford Cathedral on April 17.

Sombre funeral garb, presumably? No, “wear your brightest tie”.

How appropriate.

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