The Irish Independent reports that Defence Minister Willie O'Dea last night vehemently denied reports that Dell has told the Government that it is to wind down its massive Limerick facility from January.

Speculation has mounted over the US firm's intentions since it was reported it was trying to sell off factories in an effort to cut costs and improve profitability.

Dell has admitted it wants to reduce expenses so that in 2010 its costs are $3bn (€2.2bn) a year lower than they were in 2007.

The firm currently employs 3,000 people at its manufacturing facility in Limerick and a further 1,350 people at its sales and marketing operation in Dublin and Wicklow.

The current speculation centres on the future of the Limerick site at Raheen amid fears Dell will downscale the site to cut costs.

The 'Wall Street Journal' revealed last month Dell was considering closing its Irish plant and yesterday it was claimed Dell told the Government and the IDA it plans to wind down operations in January 2009.

Former Fine Gael leader and Limerick East TD Michael Noonan urged ministers to make a statement. "The Dell workforce are very worried and concerned about their future employment and they deserve to know what is going on," Mr Noonan insisted.

But Mr O'Dea last night said reports he had been privately informed of such a move was "totally untrue".

"That's just a total untruth, a total lie," the minister said.

"I haven't spoken to a Dell executive in I'd say about three years, and I know the Tanaiste hasn't been informed about any decision by Dell either because I'm keeping in close touch with her about the situation."

Speculation

A spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment last night insisted no decision had been made regarding the plant.

"No decision has been made regarding the plant in Limerick. Anything else is pure speculation."

Fine Gael TD Kieran O'Donnell and Labour TD Jan O'Sullivan urged the Government to pull out all the stops to save Dell jobs.

A spokesman for Dell said a report yesterday of a January closure was "completely untrue and without foundation".

The Irish Independent also reports that merger and acquisition activity in Ireland in the third quarter of 2008 was down 37pc on the same period in 2007, according to the latest M&A survey by CFM Capital.

CFM, the corporate finance division of Mazars, reports that the number of third-quarter deals fell from 67 in 2007 to 42 in 2008 while the value of third-quarter acquisitions by Irish companies fell from €5.2bn in 42 deals in third- quarter 2007 to a mere €664m in 23 deals in third quarter 2008.

CFM Capital managing director Enda Gunnell said there is anecdotal evidence of investors pulling out of deals at the late stages of a transaction and postponing activity until conditions improve. "The growth trend in M&A activity which has continued since 2002 has now reversed and we would expect weaker activity for the rest of the current year and at least the first half of 2009," he said.

Access

However Mr Gunnell added that those Irish companies who do have access to cash stand to benefit from what has now become a buyers' market. "Buyers with access to cash have a real opportunity to strengthen their market position through acquisition because of lower company valuations, favourable foreign exchange rates if buying internationally and reduced competition from highly leveraged private equity buyers," he said.

Unfortunately for some firms who have the appetite to buy but who don't have the access to cash, the wait until the supply of bank lending returns to more normal conditions may cost them some great acquisition opportunities. "Those businesses may need to review their assets and consider selling non-core businesses to allow them finance acquisitions and take advantage of the current buyers' market," Mr Gunnell said.

The Irish Times reports that Anglo Irish Bank chairman Seán Fitzpatrick has rejected suggestions that the crisis in Irish banks was brought about by "reckless" lending of up to €100 billion to property developers.

Mr Fitzpatrick, who acknowledged his bank was close to failing last week, said the crisis was caused by global liquidity problems but not bad debts.

Speaking on RTÉ's Marian Finucane Show and later at the annual La Touche Legacy Seminar in Greystones, Co Wicklow, at the weekend, Mr Fitzpatrick praised the Government's decisive, bold and imaginative guarantee, maintaining that "if one Irish bank had toppled, they were all going to fall. Every single one."

"My sense was this that this was not caused by any one bank. It was not caused by any one issue with any one bank. This was caused by the global crisis and we as banks were going to fall eventually if we didn't get money. The Government was the only place we could turn to and why should the Government not act because if we didn't turn to them and they didn't act, we could end up with no banking sector being Irish-controlled and that could not be a good thing for all of us going forward."

He insisted that, during the crisis, there was "no Armageddon in Ireland because of bad debt . . . bad debts are next month's problem and I believe they [the banks] are well placed to deal with that".

However, he acknowledged: "Knowing what was going on in liquidity markets, sitting in a bank last week wondering where to get money to make payments going forward was a challenge."

Mr Fitzpatrick blamed certain commentators for creating "confusion" about bad debts. "People adding two plus two and coming up with five . . . saying that banks were about to go because of loans to developers, of reckless lending on about €100 billion."

Describing the guarantee as the single most important decision by any government since the foundation of the State, Mr Fitzpatrick said the move - despite criticism internationally - was likely to become a template towards which most other European banks will move.

Ultimately, he said, the Irish banks would pay about €500 million for the guarantee and would have to change their practices and be unashamedly grateful to every taxpayer and the Government.

The Irish Times also reports that criticisms of the Fás internal audit team by the authority's director general, Rody Molloy, were rejected by a committee of the Fás board, the newspaper has learned.

The board's audit committee "is satisfied that internal audit function acted with propriety and integrity in all aspects of the case", the head of the committee, Niall Saul, wrote to Mr Molloy on March 15th, 2007, following criticisms made by Mr Molloy in a letter to Mr Saul on February 6th.

Mr Molloy wrote his letter after internal audit had finished a special inquiry into spending and breaches of procurement rules over a number of years at the authority's corporate affairs division.

The special audit is currently the focus of an inquiry by the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts and has led to a request from the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, to the Comptroller Auditor General, John Buckley, to conduct a special investigation into Fás.

The internal audit inquiry, which involved interviewing parties outside Fás, discovered a series of controversial matters, including suspected overcharging of Fás and contracts being awarded to companies in breach of Fás procurement rules. In the course of the inquiry, one matter was referred to the Garda and its investigation is ongoing.

In his letter to Mr Saul, Mr Molloy set out "certain concerns" which the executive, he said, had in respect of some aspects of the internal auditors' work. He said the original investigation into allegations concerning corporate affairs had been "extended without the courtesy of advising senior management" and that there had been an "almost endless expansion of the investigation".

"The interviewing of certain external people caused extraordinary difficulties for Fás management - eg Independent Group. Management had no prior knowledge that a senior executive of the group would be interviewed by the Fás internal audit. Subsequently a senior executive from Independent Newspapers met with the director general to express annoyance at internal audit calling on them."

Mr Molloy's expression of concern was referred by the board audit committee to Fás internal audit. Internal audit responded in detail on February 13th, 2007, to each of the points raised by Mr Molloy, rejecting each of them in turn (see panel).

Mr Saul then wrote to Mr Molloy, informing him that the audit committee was"fully satisfied that the audit function acted correctly and did nothing by deed or omission that could be reasonably construed as being prejudicial to any party or to the interests of the organisation as a whole".

Mr Saul, referring to the head of the corporate affairs division, who was subsequently disciplined as a result of the report, also said:"The audit committee is unclear as to why the appendix containing clauses 21 and 22 was copied to the executive manager whose actions are in the main the subject of the audit report."

Clauses 21 and 22 are the sections of Mr Molloy's letter where he outlines the main criticisms of the audit teams work.

"In the committee's view nothing was done by the audit function that could be construed by any reasonable person as being of sufficient materiality to impact in any negative light on the validity of the audit report," Mr Saul wrote. "I reiterate that the audit committee is firm in its view that a full and comprehensive investigation must take place into the very serious issues" that arose in the course of the investigation.

The head of the corporate affairs division was disciplined as a result of what was discovered during the audit inquiry but remained in his position. He has been on sick leave since some details of the report were released to the media under the Freedom of Information Act, in June. Fás has a budget this year of €1 billion.

Differing views: Fás director general and internal audit

What Rody Molloy said:

"The anonymous allegations were investigated, then other allegations arose. These were investigated and then other allegations arose, etc. The investigation was extended without the courtesy of advising senior management who had initiated the original investigation."

What internal audit said:

"The facts do not support this criticism."

"It is not correct to state that internal audit did not brief senior management during the investigation."

The audit team said it informed management before going to interview a party outside the authority. New allegations were made to the audit team in the course of the interview, and the team reported back to Mr Molloy, another senior Fás executive and a solicitor from William Fry, on February 28th, 2005.

At the meeting, internal audit "told senior management that it now would be necessary to interview other parties external to Fás and that, in the view of internal audit, it would not be advisable that senior management were informed in advance on a case by case basis. Senior management accepted this."

What Rody Molloy said:

"A trawl of an individual's e-mails was undertaken at a time when corporate policy in this area was far from clear."

What internal audit said:

"After taking legal advice, the e-mails of the head of corporate affairs were examined based on the IT security policies that were in place at that time".

What Rody Molloy said:

The interviewing of certain external people caused extraordinary difficulties for Fás management - eg Independent Group. Management had no prior knowledge that a senior executive of the group would be interviewed by the Fás internal audit. Subsequently a senior executive from Independent Newspapers met with the director general to express annoyance at internal audit calling on them.

What internal audit said:

The senior executive from Independent Newspapers was not told about a special investigation or letter of accusation being received by Fás."Internal audit stated that their visit was part of a standard audit . . . After a set of standard questions and answers, the senior manager (from Independent Newspapers) spontaneously raised the issue of inappropriate payments to . . . Internal audit doesn't know the source of any information the senior manager may have had about the existence of allegations."

The internal audit team also said: "In the normal course of events the report would have been sent to the Comptroller Auditor General's office shortly after its finalisation in May 2006, together with other internal audit reports produced in the second quarter of the year. The Comptroller Auditor General's office was informed of the existence of the report but a copy was not forwarded because inter aliathe mere fact of its finalisation was being contested with Fás. As the report is now acknowledged as finalised, a copy is being forwarded along with the batch of internal audit reports completed in the last quarter of 2006."

The Irish Examiner reports that business activity continues to weaken and will get even worse findings in the latest business survey disclose.

The latest IIB/ICAI poll shows recession is having a deepening impact with just one in nine companies taking on new staff and two out of five cutting jobs.

On the budget, the majority of firms in the survey sent a clear message to Finance Minister Brian Lenihan to support struggling Irish businesses on October 14.

Just one in 10 say Budget 2009 should focus exclusively on the public finances, according to today’s Autumn 2008 IIB Bank/ICAI Business Sentiment survey.

The upcoming budget is seen as important but is unlikely to transform the Irish economic outlook, said Austin Hughes, chief economist at IIB Bank, who carried out the research. “Most firms think it was a good idea to bring forward the Budget but only one in 10 think Mr Lenihan should focus exclusively on the deterioration in the public finances.”

Business wants a measured budget according to the survey results, said Hughes. “Roughly one in three companies think the priority should be to support the broad economic outlook, while the majority (55%) feel the upcoming budget must strike a balance between fiscal prudence and supporting activity.”

Among the other negatives is the impact of the credit crunch across the business spectrum.

One in nine firms have reported no impact, while one in three said it was having a substantial effect on their business.

Access to credit is a real problem, with just one in nine firms citing dearer credit as concern.

One in four said getting credit has become a big problem in their day-to-day business activities with “roughly two in three firms saying the credit crunch is translating into weaker demand for the goods and services they produce”, he said.

Overall, the near-term outlook is not encouraging with conditions due to worsen by the year end, said Ronan O’Brien, of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAI).

Difficulties in construction were well reflected in the survey, while the findings also showed “that consumers continue to rein in their spending” while “on the other hand, business services are still doing comparatively well”.

The jobs’ outlook has also turned hostile in an economy that generated over one million new jobs during the boom, with a sharp change in the Irish jobs’ market over the past 12 months starting to filter through in the poll.

“A year ago, nearly three times as many companies were saying they were hiring as reporting a drop in employment. Now these proportions have reversed as businesses respond to a harsher economic climate” said Mr O’Brien.

The survey reflects the views of chartered accountants working in executive positions in Ireland’s leading companies and involved 450 responses.

The Financial Times reports that the desperate efforts to salvage government-led bail outs of banks in Germany and Belgium was on Sunday night overshadowing promises by European leaders to protect the financial system from collapse – provoking new questions over the adequacy of Europe’s response to the crisis.

At a summit in Paris on Saturday French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his German, British and Italian counterparts vowed not to let a single bank fail, saying they would tackle their own national banking crises rather than pursue an EU-wide rescue.

Mr Sarkozy hastily convened the meeting in an effort to help restore confidence after the financial crisis swept into Europe last week.

But Sunday’s effort to save Hypo Real Estate in Germany and the Belgian and Luxembourg operations of Fortis raised concerns over the effectiveness of Europe’s response.

Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think-tank, predicted the summit would fail to reassure markets. The four leaders were too focused on protecting national banks and deposits whereas it was the cross-border interbank lending market that was “broken” and required a Europe-wide solution.

Measures

• Allow banks to apply mark-to-market accounting rules for assets more flexibly in line with US practices

• European Commission to draw up EU rules aligning bank deposit guarantee schemes

• Establish task forces to coordinate with the US authorities and others during crises

• Supervisors to draw up codes of conduct on pay and risk-taking

• The EU should recognise current exceptional circumstances when applying stability and growth pact

“They don’t see that they will sink or swing together,” Mr Gros said.

The summit was geared as much to tightening rules to prevent future crises as to tackling the existing one, with the four premiers agreeing to dealing with their own problems with their own resources, albeit in co-ordination with each other.

They called for a partial relaxation of mark-to-market accounting rules for assets, closer supervision of bankers’ pay, further co-operation between regulators and fresh EU-wide rules on bank deposit guarantees.

The four heads of government concluded that the European economy was facing “exceptional circumstances” – a significant phrase which, if backed by other EU governments, could trigger the suspension of the EU’s stability and growth pact with its 3 per cent public deficit limit.

Despite Sunday night’s developments, the summit was portrayed as a diplomatic triumph for the French president by some parts of the French media, not least because he succeeded in persuading Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to accept that “the application of the stability and growth pact should also reflect the exceptional circumstances”.

Not all EU governments may agree, however. “The showdown was bound to happen and it started here,” said Charles Wyplosz, professor of economics at Geneva’s Graduate Institute.

While calling for flexibility in state aid rules, they also upped the pressure on Ireland, which has angered its partners with a blanket guarantee of bank debts. They said it would have to discuss its scheme with European Commission and the European Central Bank.

The summit produced a statement of intent, rather than a list of concrete decisions, not least because leaders could be seen handing down orders to the 23 other EU governments that were not invited.

The conclusions will be examined by finance ministers from all 27 EU governments meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday, then again at a summit of leaders in Brussels next week. Wording was also sufficiently loose to help paper over cracks between governments.

The most specific measure was a €30bn (£23bn, $41bn) loan programme from the European Investment Bank to small businesses, but that had already been announced, although the meeting asked for the money to be frontloaded.

The summit called for greater flexibility in accounting rules by the end of October, in line with US practices.

The FT also reports that resignation rolled into the City this week.

While the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September sparked outright panic and heavy drinking, this week’s giant stock market falls were greeted with quiet despair.

From Canary Wharf to the Square Mile, most financial service workers stayed by their phones, getting on with whatever work they had, while keeping one eye on the screens to see which bank would fail next.

“For the first time this week, there is an understanding that there isn’t going to be a bounce, that it won’t just flip on its head and that we are on a really long painful journey,” said Alex Snow, chief executive of Evolution Securities.

Men in casual clothes are turning up for afternoon pick-up at schools all over central London, and enrolment at the Instituto Cervantes is up 15 per cent this autumn, as daytime Spanish classes fill with people who suddenly have time on their hands. Some Tube crowds have shifted to later in the morning, as structured finance workers who used to charge into the City or Canary Wharf by 7:30am or 8am now arrive closer to 9:30am because they have nothing to do.

The effects have rippled out to financial services professionals in the regions. The 7:15am train from Birmingham to London’s Euston Station, which used to be standing room only most mornings, is regularly only two-thirds full, passengers report.

“There is unrelieved gloom about the outlook. This is as bad as it has been since the early 1970s,” said Peter Norris, a longtime corporate financier who now heads the merchant bank Quayle Munro.

Younger accountants and finance workers, who have swarmed to London from Australia and south-east Asia in recent years, are now heading home again. Some have seen their contracts terminated, others are dismayed the falling pound has eroded their wages.

Younger UK nationals are rethinking their plans as well, recruiters say. Some consider careers outside finance and others are simply getting out. “Young people are more likely to say: ‘I always wanted to travel’ and hop on a plane,” said Phil Sheridan, UK managing director of the recruiting firm Robert Half.

Those remaining steel themselves for a downturn of years, not months. “We all expect that the next two or three years are going to be difficult,” said Stuart Fraser, policy director for the City of London corporation.

Top restaurants are still full at the end of the week but Monday and Tuesday nights are getting thinner.

The Wheatsheaf pub near London Bridge has had a two-for-one lunch special for years but when sales really took off a few weeks ago, the manager renamed it the “credit crunch lunch”.

At Nicholson & Griffin, a men’s hairdressers near Cannon Street station, business has tailed off so badly owner Andy Griffin is to change his business model: “We’re going to stay open later and start earlier because people can’t leave their desks.”

Perhaps most disturbing for financial services workers is that, after years of bonuses tied to personal performance, they face a future no longer under their control. “What is unfair is if you are an analyst who takes zero risk for the bank, and yet you can still be harmed by somebody who has been acting like they work for a mortgage hedge fund rather than an investment bank,” said a Lehman employee whose team was picked up by Nomura.

The New York Times reports that cowed by the financial crisis, American consumers are pulling back on their spending, all but guaranteeing that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better.

In response to the falling value of their homes and high gasoline prices, Americans have become more frugal all year. But in recent weeks, as the financial crisis reverberated from Wall Street to Washington, consumers appear to have cut back sharply. Even with the government beginning a giant bailout of the financial system, their confidence may have been too shaken for them to resume their free-spending ways any time soon.

Recent figures from companies, and interviews across the country, show that automobile sales are plummeting, airline traffic is dropping, restaurant chains are struggling to fill tables, customers are sparse in stores.

When the final tally is in, consumer spending for the quarter just ended will almost certainly shrink, the first quarterly decline in nearly two decades. Many economists, who began the third quarter expecting modest growth, now believe the cutbacks are so severe that the overall economy did not expand either, and they warn that a consumer-led recession could be more severe than the relatively mild one earlier this decade.

“The last few days have devastated the American consumer,” said Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a consultancy, who said he worried that the constant drumbeat of negative news about the economy was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. “They all feel poor.”

For some Americans, the pain is already acute: jobs disappeared at a faster clip in September. For many others, day-to-day finances are fine for now, but the financial outlook is uncertain: 401(k) accounts are dwindling, loans are hard to get and house prices continue to fall.

Claudia Prindiville, a 41-year-old mother of three, is among those feeling anxious. Shopping at a Talbots store in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, she said her own family’s finances had not yet suffered. Still, she pulled out a coupon to buy a two-piece sweatsuit, and at The Children’s Place she bought pants and shirts from the sale rack.

“All the talk about how bad it is out there has started getting in my head,”she said.“I still need to shop for my kids’ school clothes, but I am definitely buying less for myself.”

Consumer spending, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the economy, grew modestly earlier in the year but fell in July and August on an annualized rate. When the government releases quarterly numbers this month, they are expected to show that consumer spending shrank 3 percent or more. That would be the first quarterly decline since 1990, ahead of the 1991 recession, and the steepest since 1981.

According to interviews with shoppers, analysts and company executives, the impact of the financial news of the last two weeks has been palpable in many corners of the country, from car dealerships, which endured the worst month for sales in 15 years, to the flashy casinos of Las Vegas, where spending at luxury restaurants and stores and at gambling tables has gone from bad to worse.

“In the last few days, there has been a huge drop-off in foot traffic and almost zero sales,”said Gil Colon, sales manager at Villa Reale, a high-end art and furniture store in Las Vegas, who has laid off five sales people in the last five months, leaving three.

“People have lost their confidence. They have no buying power. They are losing their retirements, their vacation funds, and they are scared to commit to buying anything,” he said.

The picture is just as grim at suburban malls and city boutiques, where traffic is disappearing as retailers brace for what many predict will be a dismal holiday shopping season. Some have responded by reducing the number of sales people or their hours.

Taking a break outside an Office Depot store in suburban Chicago, Dave Cargerman, a 25-year-old sales clerk, said his hours had been cut back. “We got killed during the back-to-school sales,” Mr. Cargerman said. “And that time of year is usually our bread and butter.”

Nearby, employees at Lattof Chevrolet were preparing to close the doors this month on a business that opened in 1936. It may not be the last dealership to go: the percentage of people saying they expect to buy a car in the next six months, on a three-month moving average, has fallen to 5 percent, the lowest figure since the Conference Board started asking about such plans in its consumer confidence survey, in 1967.

“We’re not selling S.U.V.’s and trucks at all,”said Raul Trejo, 24, a mechanic. “We saw it coming.”

The situation is so uncertain that some retailers are simply not even trying to estimate their sales. Pier 1 Imports and Circuit City stores recently withdrew their guidance to Wall Street about earnings and said they would not offer any more predictions this year.

At a retail conference in New York on Thursday, Michael W. Rayden, chairman and chief executive of Tween Brands, which owns the Limited Too and Justice chains, spoke about consumer fears. “As I travel around the country and listen to moms and little girls, it is amazing how much even these 10-year-old girls are aware that something is going on,” he said. “Mom is saying, ‘I can’t afford that.’ ”

Even Apple, maker of the iPhone, is not immune as concerns mount about consumer electronics. The stock of Apple ended the week down 19 percent after two stock analysts suggested that the rapid cooldown in consumer spending would put an end to the company’s hot sales streak.

Casual dining restaurants, which have struggled in recent years because of a glut of restaurants and higher-quality fare at fast-food chains, have taken a beating already this year, forcing the Bennigan’s chain to close and leaving several others struggling. “I think September could be the worst month of the year, and we’ve had a lot of bad months,” said Lynne Collier, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets who covers the restaurant industry.

At a Chili’s Grill & Bar in the Arlington Heights suburb of Chicago, Nichol Bedsole, a 23-year-old salon manager, said she used to eat at places like Chili’s at least once a week but no longer does.

“Now it’s more like twice a month, and it’s somewhere cheap, like Subway,”she said. “I have a lot of bills to pay.”

Consumers are cutting back on air travel, whether for business or pleasure. Passenger volume is dwindling even faster than airlines can sideline planes and cut poorly performing routes. At American Airlines, domestic passengers flew 11.7 percent fewer miles in September, while the airline cut 9.4 percent of domestic seats.

The consumer slowdown in recent weeks comes after spending drops in July and August, when tax rebates came to an end. The financial shocks on Wall Street accelerated the decline, along with limits on consumer credit imposed by some banks.

“Consumers have become quite concerned that the recession, which they think is already under way, will last longer than they anticipated and will be deeper,”said Richard Curtin, director of the Reuters-University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, describing the most recent poll. “They see their worst fears coming true.”

In addition, household net worth, which greases spending, fell $6 trillion over the last year, with $1 trillion of that in just the last four weeks, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Less than a month ago, Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, a forecasting service, predicted that domestic economic output would rise 1.2 percent in the third quarter. “At the moment I’m running close to zero,” he said, “and maybe a negative.”

Of course, the economic malaise has not yet hurt all businesses. It has even been good for some.

Entertainment and media executives remain optimistic about sales of movie tickets, DVDs and games. At Nintendo of America, the popular Wii video game consoles are still selling briskly at about $300.

“My view is that when consumers get concerned about their nest egg, or their country, they need entertainment,” said Bo Andersen, president and chief executive of the Entertainment Merchants Association, which represents distributors and retailers of home entertainment products.

And as fewer people eat at restaurants, food is flying off the shelves at grocery stores. David Driscoll, a stock analyst for Citigroup, said the shares of big food companies have risen about 17 percent this year. By contrast, he said, the restaurant sector is down 4 percent.

“The alternative of restaurants is buying groceries and eating at home,” he said,“and right now, that’s an attractive alternative.”

Daniel Kimble, 31, was putting Mr. Driscoll’s theory into practice on Friday. An independent trucker from Oklahoma, he stopped his rig outside a Wal-Mart in Cleveland on his way to a nearby factory.

Mr. Kimble ticked off a long list of his money-saving steps, from driving his pickup truck less to using less laundry detergent to buying fewer clothes. And he has stopped eating at restaurants on the road, which is why he was parked at Wal-Mart.

“I’m going in to buy some lunch meat and some bread, whatever’s cheap,”he said.“I’ve got to save money, you know?”

The NYT also reports that in the midst of a financial crisis, a towering figure of American business steps forward with his reputation and financial resources for public good and personal gain.

Their times and personalities are vastly different, of course. But J. Pierpont Morgan’s role in the Panic of 1907 has its echo in Warren E. Buffett’s actions during the current financial troubles.

“What Buffett is doing is similar in ways to what Morgan did in 1907,”said Richard Sylla, an economist and financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “It’s what you might call profitable patriotism.”

Comparing the two men and their moves in periods of market turmoil, just more than a century apart, reveals how much some things have changed over the years and how other things have not, according to business historians and finance experts.

Morgan was 70 during the financial crisis of 1907, in the twilight of his career. Mr. Buffett is 78. Like Morgan so long ago, Mr. Buffett now finds himself “at the center of things; he draws headlines and he inspires confidence,” said Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and a co-author with Sean D. Carr of “The Panic of 1907: Lessons From the Market’s Perfect Storm” (Wiley, 2007).

In the last two weeks alone, Mr. Buffett has exercised his influence mainly by investing in embattled blue-chip companies, committing a total of $8 billion to Goldman Sachs and General Electric. He drove hard bargains and invested on favorable terms.

Mr. Buffett has been fielding many phone calls recently because of his cash, his reputation and his ability to act quickly. The G.E. investment, for example, was put together in a matter of hours, after G.E. reached out to Mr. Buffett through his longtime banker at Goldman Sachs, Byron D. Trott.

“In the last few weeks, everyone who has been in trouble or thought they were in trouble has called him,”said Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life,” a biography released last week by Bantam. Ms. Schroeder, a former Wall Street analyst, is the first Buffett biographer to receive his cooperation, and she said she talked to him regularly.

The companies benefit from the credibility dividend that comes with the Buffett endorsement. Last Thursday, the day after he announced his investment in G.E., the company raised more than $12 billion in a public sale of shares.

Mr. Buffett is also the largest shareholder in Wells Fargo, which last Friday swept in with a $15 billion bid for another banking company, Wachovia, offering seven times what Citigroup did at the start of the week.

Mr. Buffett is the world’s richest person, topping this year’s ranking of billionaires by Forbes magazine with $62 billion. Mr. Buffett has pledged to give most of that fortune to charity upon his death.

Yet even more than money, Mr. Buffett brings the reputational capital that comes from being a peerless long-term investor, revered for his acumen and sound judgment.

“So there is immense signaling power to Buffett’s moves, showing others that now may be a good time to invest,” Mr. Bruner said.

Morgan wielded his power over the financial markets more directly than Mr. Buffett, though his personal wealth lagged the early 20th century industrial titans John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

In 1907, the United States had no central bank. The financial crisis began that year because trust companies handling wills and estates — firms long synonymous with safe investment — exploited legal loopholes and became wild speculators in the stock market. When those investments soured, the collapse of the trusts threatened the financial system.

Morgan stepped in and functioned as America’s central bank. The United States Treasury handed him $25 million (more than $550 million today) with the blessing of President Theodore Roosevelt — who was not a natural Morgan ally, given his aversion for big business and its leaders, memorably deriding them as“malefactors of great wealth.”

But those were dire economic times. Morgan gathered his fellow financiers at his Manhattan mansion and hammered out a rescue plan. After a few rocky weeks, the panic subsided.

“In 1907, Morgan was not only committing some of his own money but also organizing the entire financial community to join in the rescue,”said Ron Chernow, a business historian and the author of “The House of Morgan” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).

Indeed, Mr. Chernow said, one motivation for creating the Federal Reserve in 1913 was that Morgan would not be around forever. Morgan died that same year.

Morgan also used the power of his personality and public statements to try to sway market behavior and psychology. In the current crisis, when authorities became concerned that short-sellers were accelerating the stock-market swoon, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a legal order prohibiting short-selling in the shares of roughly 800 companies.

In 1907, financial policies were less formal. Morgan simply stated that short-sellers, who bet that a company’s share price would drop, “shall be properly attended to,” said John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author.

His words were to be taken as an implied threat, and a reminder that he was watching. “Nobody wanted to find out what that might mean,” Mr. Gordon explained. “In Morgan’s day, the world was so much smaller, and Morgan was so powerful.”

The estimated $44 billion in cash that Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, has on hand is a modest sum compared with the vast size of today’s financial markets. So he can make selective investments but not turn things single-handedly.

At a time when government looms so much larger in the economy than it did a century ago, Mr. Buffett, unlike Morgan, is not directly involved in the current rescue. Yet Mr. Buffett has said that the government has asked for his advice, and he knows and admires the architect of the rescue package, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

Mr. Buffett, according to Ms. Schroeder, has over the years become more comfortable and more committed to speaking out on public issues. “It’s not lost on him that people trust him more than they trust politicians,” she said.

Mr. Buffett still speaks to the press only occasionally, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. But after the House of Representatives rejected the rescue plan last Monday, Mr. Buffett got a call from Charlie Rose, the television interviewer, who has known Mr. Buffett for years. He urged Mr. Buffett to appear on his PBS interview show as soon as possible.

“I told him, ‘You have to do this,’ ” Mr. Rose recalled in an interview on Saturday.“ ‘No one has your credibility, and people want to hear what you have to say.’ ”

Mr. Buffett agreed to do it, and Mr. Rose flew to San Diego, where Mr. Buffett would be on Wednesday. The hour long interview on Wednesday night was vintage Warren Buffett: calm, plain-spoken and wry.

He called the current crisis an economic Pearl Harbor, requiring immediate action. Its biggest single cause, he explained, was the real estate bubble. “Three hundred million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently,” he said. “Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.”

As far back as 2003, Mr. Buffett had warned that the complex securities at the center of today’s troubles — once so profitable, but now toxic — were “financial weapons of mass destruction.” These securities were engineered by the math quants on Wall Street, and in the interview Mr. Buffett expressed his disdain:“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

To help pay for the rescue, the government should raise taxes on the wealthy, Mr. Buffett suggested. “I’m paying the lowest tax rate that I’ve ever paid in my life,” he said. “Now, that’s crazy.”

On Friday, after public sentiment shifted, the House passed the financial rescue package. But the markets are still weak, and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Buffett’s recent investments will prove to be wise ones.

“It’s a high-risk moment, and I think he may have ventured into the waters prematurely,”said Mr. Chernow, the historian. “But Warren Buffett is worth many billions of dollars, and I am assuredly not.”