According to OneSky Jets, a private jet charter company in the US, 15 per cent of its customers say their main reason for chartering a jet is to fly their dog, cat or other pet around.

I have observed before that the twin phenomena of growing dispersion of wealth and sentimentality towards animals is starting to produce bizarre effects. Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate, left her dog Trouble a $12m trust fund when she died earlier this year.

OneSky does come up with some plausible reasons why people charter jets for their pets. It is very hard to squeeze them into the passenger cabins of commercial flights, the authorities only allow pets to travel in aircraft holds when the outside temperature is not too hot or cold, and there have been a lot of pet deaths in transit.

Still, if the figure is accurate, it says something remarkable, and a bit disturbing, about how much people who can afford it will splash out on their pets. OneSky cites the case of a woman from Chicago who spent $12,000 to fly her two elderly dogs to Maine. That’s a lot of dog biscuits.

There was an strange story in the New York Times yesterday that seemed, within the po-faced confines of New York Times news style, to be mocking Bob Nardelli, the new chief executive of Chrysler.

Mr Nardelli’s offence was to compare the experience of driving a car to that of being in a favourite room, where one finds gratification and tranquility away from the hubbub of public transport.

The piece, by the Times’ motor industry correspondent, suggested that Mr Nardelli was having trouble putting behind him his previous job as chief executive of Home Depot and was still focused on home improvement rather than becoming a "car guy" - Detroit’s moniker for an industry insider.

I have two points to make in response.

The first is that I think Mr Nardelli is right about the appeal of cars to ordinary folk. I do not own a car and so commute daily by public transport. But I remember when I did own one, in London, feeling the pleasure of being insulated from the outside world as I drove around.

The second is that Mr Nardelli’s attempts not to think like a "car guy" are to his credit. It was, after all, the "car guys" who brought Detroit to its current, desperate, state. The motor industry has always struck me as far too insular and inwardly-obsessed.

If Mr Nardelli is trying to break out of this mind-set, no matter in how awkward a manner, he deserves a slap on the back rather than ridicule.

Our old friend, the person familiar with the situation, has been hard at work in the past few days. He (or she, since we do not know his or her identity) has popped up all over the place.

In The Wall Street Journal today, for example, "informed individuals" have been chattering about the severance package that Stan O’Neal can expect when he steps down as chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch. Meanwhile, "people familiar with the firm" told the Journal on Monday that Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, was a prime contender to succeed Mr O’Neal.

But the person familiar with the situation is an equal opportunity blabber. He (or she) also turned up in the Financial Times on Monday. People "familiar with the matter" predicted that Blackstone Group could walk away from a deal to buy part of PHH, a unit of General Electric. Simultaneously, people "close to the situation" suggested that the Ford family had cooled on the idea of selling the family firm.

Continue reading "Who was that invisible (and familiar) man?"

I spent yesterday afternoon at the New School in New York listening to a panel of Senators and one Congressman discussing what to do about the US healthcare system. They were sponsors of rival bills in Congress intended to reform the expensive and inefficient status quo.

Aiming off for the fact that it was a New York academic audience confronting a bunch of inside-the-Beltway reformers, a few things struck me.

1. The US  system is not only widely regarded as absurd by the outside world but has lost credibility in the US itself. That is not just because the country spends $2,300bn a year on health while an estimated 47m Americans are without health insurance. Important constituencies, notably employers that are the primary sponsors of health insurance, are also groaning under the strain.

2. A single-payer universal healthcare system such as the National Health Service in the UK is a non-starter. John Conyers, a Congressman who has proposed extending Medicare - the federal programme for the elderly - to the whole population, won applause from the audience by denouncing flaws in the US system. But the US is simply not going to accept a "socialised" health care system.

3. Change is going to come. One of Hillary Clinton’s achievements in the current campaign for the Democrat nomination is to put behind her nasty memories of Hillarycare and propose a health reform that is radical and yet acceptable. My colleague Clive Crook wrote interestingly about this last month.

4. Nobody quite knows what should be done. As Ron Wyden, a Democrat senator for Oregon, said, you can elicit equal applause from a US audience by denouncing the notion that the government should run healthcare and by criticising the vagaries of US insurers.

Some things do not change. It is late October and there are pumpkins and cobwebs on stoops in Brooklyn.

On Saturday night, my New York subway carriage was filled with people in Halloween costumes, including a tall Frankenstein with a bolt through his neck who stood up and roared to general applause.

And, yes, the latest installment of the Saw franchise (in this case, Saw IV) has debuted at the top of the box office chart, once again showing the wisdom of Lionsgate, the studio behind the franchise.

I cannot tell you anything much about the Saw franchise, since I have not seen any of them and do not intend to. I am too squeamish to do anything more scary at Halloween than help my daughter prepare her skeleton costume for trick and treating.

But it is intriguing that Lionsgate, which pioneered the resurgence of the low budget horror franchise aimed at a college student audience, has struck gold once again. Saw IV is estimated to have brought in $32m this weekend, a year after Saw III brought in $33m on its opening weekend.

It does not seem as though there is anything to stop Lionsgate carrying on with Saws V, VI, VII, VIII etc.

Given that Hollywood is beset by volatility and unpredictability ("Nobody knows anything," the screeenwriter William Goldman observed) a low-budget franchise with no stars to demand a slice of the back-end and an impeccable revenue record is something to be envied.

Now seems a good time to revisit my post earlier this month on which bank chief executive was most likely to lose his job: Chuck Prince of Citigroup, Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns or Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch.

At the time, Mr O’Neal was in a fairly distant third place, but that was before Merrill bumped up its already enormous debt write-down and gave the impression of not knowing what it was doing.

As I argued then, one of Mr O’Neal’s vulnerabilities was that he had been so ruthless with the old guard at Merrill that he had a slim base of support within the organisation. Nobody liking you much does not matter as long as things go well but it is dangerous when they do not.

And so it proved. Mr O’Neal’s final mistake, to broach a possible merger with Wachovia before consulting his board, does not seem too egregious. But it was the last straw for a board that had plainly lost faith in him. At this point, his internal critics seem to have piled in and finished off the job.

The whole affair has peculiar overtones of the putsch at Morgan Stanley in which Phil Purcell was ejected from the helm. He too was an aloof figure who aroused plenty of internal opposition and had eliminated many of the old guard.

Oddly enough, Mr Purcell too proposed a merger with Wachovia shortly before being bumped.