Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Bernanke warns, but the most remarkable thing about the US economy is its resilience

Ben Bernanke has been the voice of calm and reason in the current bout of stock market nerves, repeatedly downplaying the alarmist warnings of a possible recession voiced by his predecessor as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Now even Mr Bernanke appears to be not so sure.

In testimony to Congress yesterday, he warned that turmoil in the housing market had created growing uncertainty in the US economy. At the same time, he seemed to contradict the Fed's current neutral stance on monetary policy by saying that inflationary risks remained. The data in recent days has been weak, so his remarks had a predictably unsettling effect on markets.

Just to add to the uncertainties, the oil price is also once again strongly on the rise because of the latest outbreak of fisticuffs with Iran. The arrest of 15 British sailors in Iraqi waters is beginning to look less like a mistake and more like a deliberate escalation in hostilities.

Yet it is the US housing market which remains the main focus of concern. Just before Christmas, this seemed to be showing signs of settling down. Continued mayhem in the sub-prime mortgage market has changed that view. Sub-prime is admittedly quite a small part of the total mortgage market, and the rest is not yet obviously showing signs of distress.

Even so, it is probably still too early to be sure. Many borrowers took advantage of the ultra-low interest rates of three to four years back to remortgage into floating-rate deals away from fixed-rate ones. Much higher interest rates mean they'll now be feeling the pinch, with possibly quite severe knock-on consequences for consumer confidence and spending.

Yet for me, the more remarkable feature of the US economy is its continued strength and resilience, rather than any signs of a slowdown to come. That there could have been a monetary tightening of the scale just experienced without thus far much more severe consequences for growth and confidence is truly astonishing.

Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that long-term interest rates have remained quite low, which in turn is explained by the way the current account surpluses of Asia and the Middle East have ensured a continued ready supply of liquidity. If this starts to dry up, then Mr Bernanke may indeed find himself singing from the same hymn sheet as Mr Greenspan.

Boots and Sainsbury await their fate

These are trading statements, not defence documents. So insisted both Alliance Boots and J Sainsbury yesterday when giving updates on performance and plans for the future. Yet with private equity raiders massing at the gates, both companies needed to put their best foot forward, so how did they do?

On performance, there was a clear winner. Sainsbury has delivered up another impressive set of like-for-likes and said that its recovery programme is ahead of schedule. At Boots, the increase in like-for-like sales was much more pedestrian. Debt was also a bit higher than expected, which, because it adds to enterprise value, might interfere with the amount Stefano Pessina, the deputy chairman, and his private equity backers are prepared to offer.

Yet with Sainsbury, there is not much of a sense of where the company goes once it has completed its recovery programme. What does Justin King, the chief executive, do for an encore after he's fixed the problem? If he's got a plan, he's not saying what it is.

With Boots, the problem is rather the reverse. There is scant sign yet of the merger with Alliance Unichem delivering in the manner promised. OK, so cost synergies aresaid to be on track, but these were never up to much in the first place.

The rationale for the merger lay more with revenue gain and the opportunity to create a global health and personal care brand. In pursuit of this goal, the company plans to rebrand 900 community pharmacies under the Boots name. Systems and property needs are also being harmonised.

Then it is on to phase three of the grand strategy, which is a rather woolly declaration of intent over internationalisation of the Boots brand. This is the bit of the plan which Mr Pessina thinks he can much more effectively manage away from the goldfish bowl of public markets. Yet, for the privilege, he's going to have to pay up.

Valuation assessments aren't transformed by yesterday's updates, but they do help to explain why private equity is so interested. These are both decent companies with plenty of value left in them waiting to be unlocked.

There's a surprise: Ashley upsets City

Now there's a surprise. It is barely a month since Mike Ashley floated his Sports Direct retail empire on the stock market and already he's at daggers drawn with the City.

First he was accused of failing to communicate, then the rumour went around that the finance director had been fired and not replaced (in fact he had been on holiday), and now Mr Ashley has popped up in a personal capacity as a 3.14 per cent shareholder in one of Sports Direct's suppliers, Adidas, which in turn raises concerns over the potential for conflict of interest.

With the shares already 25p below the 300p flotation price, it is perhaps not surprising that the investment community should be feeling fractious. Yet it also begs the question of what on earth everyone thought they were buying into when the company was floated. If it was a model of box-ticking, corporate-governance excellence they were after, then they chose the wrong horse.

Mr Ashley, a notoriously secretive entrepreneur, doesn't do communication. Up until now, he's never had to explain his actions publicly to anyone. He was always bound to have difficulty coming to terms with the idea. Anyone who bought shares thinking otherwise was being naive.

As for the stake in Adidas, that's a bit of a red herring, though admittedly it does quite plainly have the potential for conflict of interest. If Mr Ashley has a major commercial interest in a particular supplier, he also has an interest in promoting that supplier to the disadvantage of others and possibly Sports Direct too. Even so, Mr Ashley's contract with the company specifically allows him to buy up to 20 per cent of apparel suppliers provided he notifies the board first.

Has Mr Ashley bought the stake as a way of exerting pressure on a supplier? Does he intend to sell it on to Sports Direct? Or perhaps he thinks it is just an undervalued asset? As ever with Mr Ashley, there are no answers. Yet he is entitled to do with his money what he wants, and in any case he's hardly likely to use the Adidas stake to disadvantage Sports Direct, in which he has a much larger commercial interest. In that sense, the conflict is more apparent than real.

Mr Ashley follows the pattern of headstrong entrepreneurs who float their companies on the stock market. Investors buy into them not because they think these business leaders will suddenly sprout wings and become paragons of angelic behaviour, but because they have a strong record of value creation which investors hope to share in. When you invest in companies such as Sports Direct, you are in for the ride, not to tie the chief executive up in knots.

As far as we know, Sports Direct is a well-managed company with excellent prospects. But it is also entrepreneurially led by a small and tightly knit group who have to date enjoyed the freedom to take decisions on their own without reference to outsiders. Plainly, they will have to get used to the demands of the City. If you are going to avail yourself of the privileges of the capital markets - which in Mr Ashley's case involved offloading nearly £1bn of stock to investors - you must expect to play by their rules.

Otherwise, this may end up an even shorter-lived dalliance with public markets than that of Sir Richard Branson, who in the mid-1980s took his company private less than a year after it had been floated. Sometimes it is best simply to agree to disagree and go your separate ways.

j.warner@independent.co.uk