Last week I was looking at US retail therapy, this week it was somewhat closer to home. Though clearly not a fashion guru I was invited along to the showing of the Marks & Spencer spring/summer collection which, the company hopes, will lure shoppers back into the store and return it to the sort of profitability it thinks it deserves.

Since its heady days of being Britain's best-loved retailer, the store has had a well-documented woeful time and has had a hard task to convince the City that it now knows what it's doing. In the last few weeks it has announced the appointment of Yasmin Yusuf as creative director of clothing - previously she was with Warehouse which she brought into profit after two years. Apparently Yasmin's strength is in identifying trends and translating design into the high street which is exactly what M&S needs.

The company has also announced a collection by George Davies who, let's face it, is an old hand at the retail concept, having been successful both in Next (before things went somewhat awry) and at ASDA. George's collection is supposed to be aimed at fashionable women who define themselves by attitude not age - a major leap forward for M&S which still continually talks about not alienating its older customer as though its older customer only wants to wear boring grey skirts with pleats.

Additionally (it's all go at M&S) its launching "Concept" stores which will have coffee shops et al and, presumably, focus on certain aspects of the clothing range.

I suppose you can't say that its not trying and I'm all for the idea of assessing what's gone wrong and making radical plans for the future. Whether or not it's enough to help the store is a moot point - you can lose customers very quickly but it's much, much harder to win them back and the retail market is probably one of the most competitive there is.

However, the share price has recovered from its lows of about 163p to current levels in the 230p range. Still a far cry from the above 600p levels of a few years ago - the levels where many staff were awarded or bought shares themselves.

I suppose M&S employees (unlike their counterparts in the tech industry) never expected to get rich quick on share options or bonuses with the company, but they certainly never expected to see them more than halve in value either.

And, of course, one of the great tragedies of M&S was that senior management seemed to ignore what the people on the shopfloor were telling them about the clothes and so the fall in fortune for the staff can clearly be laid at the door of some now departed managers.

As for the spring/summer collection, there were things I liked and things I didn't. The one item I thought was particularly nice (a lilac suede jacket) turned out to be the second most expensive piece in the collection thus proving to me that I can unerringly pick things at the top end of the market!

I did a little bit of investigation in-store afterwards and found that many of the skirts and jackets which did, actually, look great on the models (none of whom looked as though they'd ever eaten a quick M&S ready-meal in their lives) were still not displayed to best advantage in the stores themselves. Maybe they hadn't got around to it, but there's no doubt that you can have the most wonderful product in the world but if you don't show it to the best advantage people will just pass by.

I wish M&S well (and in Ireland they don't need it as much as in the UK since the Irish stores are so profitable that M&S want to open more here) but they still need to realise that women buy clothes to make themselves feel good and look good and not just because they need a new pink cardie.

I'll hang on to my own few shares for the time being (having bought them around these levels anyway) but I'm not expecting great things in the immediate future.

Great things are not expected in the US either after the University of Michigan's most recent consumer confidence survey. As you may remember, this is a number the markets take seriously and most people were looking for a slower rate of decline following the January rate cuts from the US Federal Reserve Bank.

The number came in at 87.8 against expectations of 91 (the last number was 94.7). The effect was to drive the dollar lower and, for the first time in a long time, push the price of gold up. It's now around $255/60 an ounce although that's not saying much since it's still close to its 20-year lows.

Let's face it, gold doesn't have the allure for the investor it once did. You can sit and look at it, but you can't make it work for you, the prerequisite of any investment these days.

The dollar, of course, has been the currency of choice for investors wanting to make their money work and the market has believed in a strong dollar policy for the last number of years. That took a dent, though, when Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary, said that the US wasn't pursuing such a policy and that the strong dollar was the result "of a strong economy".

In fact this is a kind of radical turn-around as far as the markets are concerned and may well signal the end of its love affair with the buck.

O'Neill's comments have made the market uncertain which leaves it rife for rumour and paranoia. And the current more turbulent conditions make it a lot more likely that the dollar graph will spike up and down in a way that it hasn't for quite some time.

Besides Michigan, other numbers have shown different facets to the US economy. Housing starts in January were stronger which is good for the construction industry but wholesale prices were higher which the bond market didn't like very much because bond traders fear that higher prices will stop the Fed cutting rates again. Unlikely - Greenspan's eye is not as firmly focused on inflation as it once was, he's more concerned with preventing recession.

I don't know whether he'll manage it. Just as I don't know whether M&S will finally turn the corner. But it'll be certainly interesting watching them both to find out.