LAURA SLATTERYtalks us through the week in business

Pay day

The Comptroller and Auditor General's report into the inner workings of Nama gives an extensive list of the professional services firms which have found it to be a lucrative source of revenue, with companies either asking for more than they had either contractually agreed to be paid (Arthur Cox) or proposing higher fees than those suggested by Nama (several property valuers). The report notes hourly fees as high as €485 were charged for the legal due diligence on the first tranche of loans that were being transferred. It also notes that, in some instances, the rate of fees quoted by tender applicants was not a factor in whether they were successful at winning the business. Wage deflation? What's that?

Cut your cloth

Wrapping your kids in cotton wool is going to become more expensive following an 80 per cent rise in cotton prices since July. Flooding in major cotton producer Pakistan and bad weather in China and India damaged new cotton crops at the same time as demand from clothing manufacturers stepped up.

With the price of cotton futures on commodity exchanges reaching a record high this week, UK fashion retail chain Next warned shoppers to expect prices to rise about 8 per cent, with no end to the “speculative bubble” in cotton prices in sight. Meanwhile, apparel industry experts were predicting one terrifying solution: polyester.

Status update

Late bug: After the clocks went back last weekend, alarm clocks on some iPhones went off an hour late on Monday due to a lovely design glitch that gave users another hour’s sleep.

Boots-filling: Chemist chain Boots said its half-year figures were boosted by shifting high volumes of its anti-ageing Protect and Perfect cream, which is fast becoming a sales stalwart.

Stock saboteurs: The LSE’s Turquoise trading platform – known as a “dark pool” because it allows anonymous trades – was temporarily shut down amid suspicion of sabotage.

$600bn

– Sum to be pumped into the US economy under "QE2" by the Federal Reserve, with economists predicting "QE3" and "QE4" if it doesn't work.

“I enjoy having kids. Or at least I enjoy making them. I don’t need an incentive to have them

Michael O’Leary wades into the should-rich-people-get-child-benefit debate with characteristic finesse.

The question Next stop Brazil?

Brazil has a new president-elect, Dilma Rousseff, and she is promising to extend the “new era of prosperity” that emerged under the reign of her patron, president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The “B” of the “Bric” nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) has turned into the investment hotspot of choice lately, with the International Monetary Fund predicting gross domestic product will grow by 7 per cent there this year.

Brazil’s economic might is due in large part to the strength of its exports to Asia and its oil wealth – when Brazilian energy giant Petrobras discovered vast new oil fields off the country’s southeast coast in 2007, Lula called it “a gift from God”.

Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, inherits a country with an economy that’s gloriously self-sufficient but lacking the infrastructure it needs before the sports fans pour in. Indeed, next month, Enterprise Ireland will facilitate handshakes between the Irish construction companies that won London 2012 tenders and the Brazilian bodies in charge of staging the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.