The back-to-school feeling applies to almost everyone in September. There's a definite mood that the more laid-back summer period, where you pushed things to the far corners of the desk so that you didn't have to see them and left the office on the dot of five to take advantage of a sunny evening, is now over and it's time again to take a look at the paperwork and the deals that you've let slide over the last few months.

(And I'm as bad as the next person, you wouldn't believe the amount of important junk that I've pretended I don't have to deal with from the home office!)

I suppose the summer malaise applies more to desk-jockeys than to anyone else, although one of my friends who works in a store said that they dread bright, sunny days because nobody comes in.

With the weather we usually get it's no wonder retail sales are normally so high in this country. A bit more sun and we would be ignoring the lure of the city-centre stores or the out-of-town shopping centres, which would no doubt cheer up the economists who are worried about our current profligate nature.

Dealers, in my experience, spend most of May muttering about the quiet summer to come, most of June suggesting that it's getting quieter because of the summer, all of July saying that it's quiet because it's summer and the month of August telling each other that it'll be busy in September. Which is, in fact, usually the case because September is the time when companies decide they'll come to the market to raise capital and when the US traders start to flex their muscles again so that they can put in a push for a big bonus by the end of the year.

Fortunately for both the companies and the dealers, many governments are currently not big borrowers of funds and have, as I mentioned some time ago, been buying back some of their longer-dated issues. This leaves bond dealers with some surplus cash to put to work.

The only problem for them is that they want to invest in relatively highly-rated products, but they're being offered lots of much lower-graded paper instead, much of it coming from the same sector - European telecom companies.

And even more problematic for them is the fact that they've bought telecom paper in the past which has been downgraded and which doesn't look very pretty on their books. Remember Mannesmann? The ink was only dry on some of that paper before the talk of downgrades started. Earlier this month, Standard & Poor's (S&P) announced suggested downgradings of France Telecom to single A from AA-, Deutsche Telekom to A- from AA- and British Telecom to Afrom AA+.

When those companies originally sold paper, it was the double A ratings that attracted many investors. BT was, in fact, due to issue paper this month but has postponed it because of the S&P downgrade levels. (Apparently there has been a war of words between BT and S&P on this issue, as a five-notch downgrade is fairly substantial.)

But France Telecom is still due to offer $5/$10 billion into the markets in September, and Telefonica (which S&P has put on negative watch) is also due to sell some corporate paper.

The potential for a downgrade will limit the type of institutional investor who normally buys this paper and, more nastily, will make the borrowings more expensive for the companies themselves. There's quite a difference in the cost of the funds for an AA and a single A borrower, somewhere around 50/60 basis points.

So when you think of the amount of money they're borrowing, it makes a huge impact on the bottom line. It's going to be a hard sell for the lead managers who'll be trying to extol the virtues of companies who've shelled out big bucks for mobile licences or other acquisitions and probably haven't the faintest idea how they're going to exploit them yet. Still, who said it was supposed to be easy?

Not easy either for the European central bankers who are no doubt casting envious glances at the US again, where the Fed was able to hold off in raising rates following a larger-than-expected decline in durable goods.

There is a consensus view (always dangerous but this time probably justified) that the US economy is slowing down nicely following the Fed's six interest rate hikes over the past 14 months.

This view was reflected in the comments from the Fed itself, which announced that the earlier tightening actions probably hadn't impacted fully on spending yet. At some point people will start to suggest that the US economy is running into trouble and is slowing down too much, but not yet.

In Europe, it's still a case of worrying about the currency. There was a temporary feeling of bullishness about the euro before the summer, which evaporated fairly quickly as the weeks went by. The ECB is between the devil and deep blue sea now because Germany's recent Ifo index has showed a second month of declining business confidence, a reading that surprised many commentators who'd been expecting a rebound. This makes the rate hike decision by the ECB even more difficult.

If the Ifo had rebounded, they could have raised rates and felt justified in their actions on purely pick-up-in-growth rather than salvaging-the-currency grounds. Now pessimists are worried that what little growth there has been in the greater euro zone will be choked off - which won't help the currency either.

Meanwhile inflation continues to rise, not helped by oil prices moving back to their highs again following concerns about supply.

The problem for the ECB is that a "one-size fits all" policy doesn't just mean problems for various member-states, it also means problems when you have a whole range of economic issues to deal with.

Even if the class swots were clamouring to get back to their desks, I'm pretty sure that some of its members wish that they could have spent a few more weeks on the beaches this year - preferably with their heads stuck in the sand.