With Singapore in easy reach - and Bali for weekends - Perth is not a bad jumping-off point for exploiting the rapid economic growth of the Pacific Rim. It has sensibly put a toe in Antipodean water before by taking over and re-fettling a lame New Zealand bank. Is Bank of Scotland's purchase of BankWest in Australia another case in point?With luck, Bank of Scotland should be able to break out of the cycle of misery with this one. Never were so many bad businesses sold to so many gullible bankers at such inflated prices. The Treasury will have to use its thickest smoke and most distorting mirrors to devise a Budget that can keep the Chancellor, his backbenchers and the voters happy without bringing the recent experiment in sound economic management to an unhappy end.A chance to get things right, for a changeIn vast swathes of the world, selling banks to the British used to be a sport on a par with flogging London Bridge to an American tourist. For Mr Clarke, gambling away the achievement of steady growth and the best inflation performance since the 1960s would be a tragic thing.

At any rate, it is wise of Mr Clarke to line Mr George up on his side before a very difficult political year. It is equally wise of Mr George to stop sawing at the limb he has stuck the Bank of England out on.But the ultimate message of Mr Clarke's speech yesterday was its most overt. Whether they really share the same ideas about how to get it from here to there is a separate question.It seems clear that both have decided to wait and see - the Chancellor with a presumption that the next move in base rates might be a fall, the Governor definitely saying it will be a rise. Luckily, we are now more sophisticated about this type of management of expectations.Another purpose of the speech was to end the perception that the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England disagree about the state of the economy and what ought to happen to interest rates. This is probably true, in the sense that Mr Clarke and Mr George share the same analysis about where the economy is and where they want it to go. This was obviously directed at members of his own party, baying for an old-fashioned pre- election giveaway.

It was also directed at his fellow ministers, for these are the people who must produce the spending cuts that will finance tax cuts without doing too much overt damage to the borrowing requirement. As Mr Clarke likes to point out, this is now on a favourable trend, but it was the giveaway before the last election that made the deficit so unfavourable to begin with. The warning was also directed at the wider world, in a classic example of dashing hopes in order to spring a pleasant surprise on Budget Day. Secondly, there was his warning not to count on tax cuts. First of all there was the usual modest message about his remarkable achievements in steering the economy to Britain's best combination of growth and inflation for at least a generation. The Chancellor's speech to an audience of engineers yesterday offers endless possibilities for textual analysis. Using Tradepoint, fund managers and broker dealers can trade directly with each other rather than submitting orders via market makers.. The Tradepoint Investment Exchange, set up by three former employees from the London Stock Exchange, offers a screen-based electronic trading system that is order-driven as opposed to the Stock Exchange's system which is quote-driven.

"I think we have a good mix of institutions both from the buying and selling side," said Stephen Wilson, Tradepoint's executive director. The membership list for the opening, which was announced yesterday, includes Cazenove, Hoare Govett Securities, ShareLink, Robert Fleming, Mercury Asset Management and Scottish Widows. Tradepoint, the new challenger to the London Stock Exchange, begins trading today with 42 participants joining it from the outset. "Mexico is a core part of the business and has been a wild card they have not been able to control," Ms Warner said.To cover the restructuring, Colgate will be taking a charge of $369m in the third quarter which will results in a loss.Commenting on the changes, Reuben Mark, chairman, said: "The rationalisation will allow us to further capitalise on improvements in manufacturing and information technologies and the efficiencies that exist today in our focused factories dedicated to the manufacture of products in specific categories."As part of the reorganisation, the Salford plant will lose production of Palmolive soap to a different factory in Anzio, Italy.. The company said earnings for the year would come out at $3.57-$3.60 per share. Analysts had been anticipating 40 cents.Performance in Mexico has been badly hit by the economic turmoil since the start of this year. In the past three years, Colgate's competitor, Procter & Gamble, has set about laying off 13,000 of its workers.Analysts were nonetheless caught off guard by earnings predictions from Colgate, also announced yesterday, which were lower than expected.