Britain's small and medium-sized enterprises have much to worry about as the European sovereign debt crisis spirals out of control once more. When the banks shut up shop again in a full-blown repeat of the first credit crunch – as they surely will if Greece walks – you can bet it will be SMEs that are starved of debt first, whatever financiers say in public.

Until now the argument has been that there's no alternative. We have to slash public spending and wages because there's so much debt that otherwise there'll be chaos. The joy of this is it saves having to make a case for your actions, so it ought to be used more often. Journalists accused of phone hacking could say: "I had no choice but to listen to a dead soldier's voicemail because otherwise there'd be chaos. Just look at Greece, they didn't hack any phones and look at the mess they're in."

The bill for rubber stamps alone comes to twice that of the defence budget

Don Lewin turned £500 into a huge gift-shop empire. But Clinton Cards failed to adapt to the internet age – and now may be forced to fold

Guardian Media Group and Apax Partners have received a boost from their troubled investment in the media giant formerly known as Emap as they offloaded its car data business CAP for an estimated £175m yesterday.

As fashion site Asos launches three new collections, Harriet Walker takes a look at a recession-proof shopping phenomenon

So the Duke of Westminster has fallen on hard times?

A trio of senior bosses at the Oxo-to-Hovis giant Premier Foods left with a total of £1.4m in extra payments last year, following a management shake-up of the struggling business.

The US consumer, whose spending spree has been the engine of global growth in the past decade, expressed more confidence in the future than any forecaster predicted in a key survey out yesterday, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 13,000 for the first time in nearly four years.

Outlook Do we want more competition in banking? John Fingleton at the Office of Fair Trading thinks so. The banks must do better for customers, or he'll sort them right out (he imagines).

St Luke's Healthcare, which treatsand looks after adults and adolescents with mental health problems and brain injuries, has gone into administration.

In profit ...

Goldman Sachs handed its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, a bonus of $7m (£4,4m) in shares for his work last year, down from $12.6m in 2010 in line with the investment bank’s slipping profits.

Successful entrepreneurs usually concentrate their efforts on three key areas: vision, people and cash.