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THE EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK has released its annual accounts for 2011 – revealing that its profits more than quadrupled in 2011.
The Frankfurt-based bank turned a profit of €728 million last year, significantly up on €171 million from 2010.
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The boosted profits came as a result of the ECB’s growing portfolio of sovereign bonds, which saw the ECB’s total interest income shoot up from €1.42 billion to just under €2 billion – half of which came directly from the bank’s holdings of bonds from eurozone countries like Ireland.
The massive increase in interest was helped by a smaller writedown on its financial assets and provisions, meaning that the bank’s total net come doubled from €586 million to €1.17 billion.
The bank has set aside another €1.166 billion towards risk provision, meaning it has now set aside a total of €6.36 billion to cover risks from fluctuations in the price of currencies, commodities and credit.
The €728 million profit, in total, is to be distributed among the central banks of eurozone member states. Ireland is set to receive about €11.5 million of that input.
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Your more likely gonna get http://www.news. Thejournal or http://www.software.Microsoft, I’m not a fan of this. People will instantly known if a new online business has the cash behind it to go it large, and the merits of the business will be over shadowed by thier ability to pay huge money’s, effectively rent for these domain names, it’s the equivalent of renting on Graftin street and totally anti why the Internet has worked so far. The beauty of the Internet is someone can have a website built and effectively be on the sane playing field as say, Brown Thomas, now just by a domain name they are instantly going to be looked at differently. The idea is great, a cost of maybe 1-2k would be more suitable. Especially if it’s yearly. Low start up internet business say buy-bye!
Sorry Paul, but that doesn’t make any sense, people will not shop online based on the TLD of a merchant, they will do so based on the same reasons they purchase from .com or .ie, etc stores today, based on product, cost and desirability. i cannot think of a single reason that one would be put of going to http://books.amazon as opposed to http://books.amazon.com.
as for the cost, for the larger ecom merchants $185K is buttons in the context of their marketing / brand awareness spending
130,000 per name I hope it does,t become a td’s expense. Apart from a rush for .sex . It will be for large brands only, judging by the release of .eu it will not be without controversy.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense really, There was the proposal for .xxx domains, so, they would be the “New Domains”. But this is just odd.
Its also a bad decision, from a marketing point of view, as your if you told your customer to go to http://www.ps3.sony they will go looking for the TLD.
It will be interesting to see what others opinions are on this.
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