GROUND FLOOR: AOL Time Warner has a huge debt burden that it is trying to reduce. The amounts are so huge that it's almost impossible to put them into context. The current debt level is $26.5 billion and it aims to bring it down to under $20 billion in the next couple of years. Slice $6.5 billion off your debt mountain? Not without a lot of pain, I think.

Last October I shared my Spanish versus Irish shopping list with you.Regretfully I haven't been to Spain since and so can't give an update (although I know my domestic shopping bill seems to rise inexorably every week). However, there have been quite a number of shopping-basket comparisons done by a variety of sources since then and most of them come up with the same result - shopping in Ireland (and particularly in Dublin) is more expensive than almost anywhere else in Europe.

Indeed, The Irish Times is encouraging readers to contact the paper if they discover any wild price differentials between Ireland and anywhere else in Europe.

After publishing my list (in which my bill came to €11.83 less in Alicante than in Dublin), I received a letter from a reader who wanted to know why I hadn't compared the price of newspapers too. And the answer, of course, is that my Spanish is of the not-very-fluent variety. So if I was to buy El Päis or the local equivalent, I might think that I'm reading an article about George W being a peaceful environmentalist whereas, in fact, it's all about his desire for a piece of the environment. And the English-language newspapers are expensive, even though many of them are actually printed in Spain. A tabloid can be between €2 and €2.50 and a broadsheet is closer to €3.

But the cost of newspapers came into focus for me this week when I discovered that The Irish Times had gone up yet again. In January 2001, as we switched over to the euro, it cost €1.27. Now it's €1.45 - an increase of 14 per cent.

The newspaper has undergone two price increases since the euro changeover. Initially it went up to €1.40, the first increase in seven years. The newspaper would argue that it was forced to impose the second increase mainly because Mr McCreevy's last budget raised VAT on newspapers. The Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner raised their cover price by five cents at the beginning of January and The Irish Times on February 1st. All declined to absorb the VAT increase.

For all of us who got caught up in the hype of the Celtic Tiger, last week's announcement from AOL Time Warner, in which it posted the biggest loss in US corporate history, should bring us back to earth. At €98.7 billion, the loss exceeds Ireland's GNP for 2001.

I do love the way companies can rack up these kind of losses and still stay in business! Back in the glory days of ever-rising stock markets, the merger between AOL and Time Warner was hyped as the way forward for corporate America. Bigger was better and biggest was best.

Now it just looks like another corporate disaster. Investors are concerned that the cable assets of the company are hugely overvalued, while the SEC is investigating AOL's accounting practices. (Although having the SEC investigate your accounting practices is becoming something of an old-hat story for many corporations, it's still not a comfortable position to be in.)

The company's chairman, Stephen M Case, resigned two weeks ago, while Ted Turner has also departed the scene. And investors are snapping at the heels of the chief executive, Richard D Parsons, who has commented that he's "pleased" with the company's fourth-quarter performance.

If the news on Q4 is enough to please him, the company has pulled off a coup because US GDP growth in Q4 was a mere 0.7 per cent. The last time it was that low, the US was officially in recession.

However, Mr Parsons has told analysts that the company will need another year or so to get over the merger and get earnings back on line. So 2003 isn't planned on being the year in which everything suddenly comes right.

And not without reneging on a lot of commitments, although whether forsaking the new office complex it's building in Manhattan is part of that plan is not yet clear. Apparently the offices are costing in the region of $800 million. Deckchairs and Titanic spring to mind.

Meanwhile, the background picture for the economy remains gloomy. Jobless claims were higher than expected last month, consumer spending only grew by 1 per cent in Q4 (the slowest since 1993), and nobody has a clue when the markets will stop falling.

The Fed, trying to be more positive, kept interest rates unchanged, rather than cutting them as some had urged, and seems to be taking the view that once war worries are out of the way the economy will begin to rebound. Well, at least defence spending is helping, up 11 per cent in Q4.

Good old George W. Keeping things afloat single-handed.