It's approaching that time of year again, when people start thinking about... Christmas. The mere thought brings smiles to most people's faces and elicits feelings of sweet anticipation and nostalgia.
Invest NI, the development agency for business in Northern Ireland, carries responsibility for the delivery of improved performance by local businesses and attracting investors in new businesses.
An agreement has been signed that the assets of Harland and Wolff can be sold to an ambitious specialist business, InfraStrata plc, to great joy from the shipyard workers.
Three long years have passed since the Brexit referendum result was announced in the early hours of June 24, 2016. The date, forever etched in the political annals, has triggered a series of unprecedented political developments. Britain is now on its third prime minister.
Wrightbus has been caught in the globally disruptive move to electric buses. Despite its proven capabilities in the production and design of urban buses, it ultimately had no bus ready to compete in this new and exploding market.
Just 16 months ago, William Wright was knighted in a ceremony at London's Buckingham Palace, lauded as a captain of industry, the patriarch of an all-conquering family business.
The Belfast Region City Deal gained official support from six Northern Ireland local authorities, the Stormont administration (in the absence of an Executive) and the UK Treasury. Together, a near £900m budget has been promised to secure the delivery of 20,000 new and better jobs over a 15 year period.
Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe made the right decision by presuming the worst about Brexit in framing next month's budget. Why go for tax cuts and higher spending increases when things could really start to get hairy by the beginning of 2020?
Three years ago, Wrightbus in Ballymena was celebrating its 70th birthday, revelling in its unbroken record of seven decades in the same family.
Talk over the last few days of an all-Ireland zone for food as a means of avoiding the backstop could be a glimmer of hope in the attempts to avoid a hard border on the island after Brexit.
Congratulations to the Department for the Economy: it has published a frank study of the factors involved in consideration of how to improve Northern Ireland's aviation connectivity, prepared by consultants at Oxford Economics.
Last week marked back to school for many households and holiday memories were fading fast. But while pictures captured on smartphones will provide reminders of the summer, what will perhaps stick in the mind most for many who holidayed abroad is the expense, with the weakness of sterling the fly in the sun lotion.
Ireland's finance minister Paschal Donohoe has some tricky decisions to make ahead of next month's Budget. Budget calls are always tricky. This time is different as Brexit looms large. So too does a possible general election in the Republic. There has been a strong feeling that if the direction and nature of Brexit became a little clearer, there would be a need to clear the political air in Ireland too.
It is common in modern homes these days to find that there isn't a physical phone installed. Rather, people are opting to rely solely on their mobile phone.
Earlier this month, there was UK-wide comment on the prospect of reduced electricity prices because the wholesale cost of natural gas has recently been falling. Northern Ireland energy market observers were surprised to learn on August 14 that the Regulator had approved a 6.1% price increase for domestic customers from October 1.
The politics of 'the deal' are everywhere right now. Donald Trump is pursuing foreign policy interests by treating everything as a deal.
In the three years that have passed since the UK voted to leave the European Union, it would be fair to say that the performance of the economy has been relatively sluggish.
The last three and a bit years of Brexit discussion has been littered with buzz words and an obvious lack of substance.
In the absence of an Executive, the day-to-day functioning of most public services which should fall within the competence of local ministers, rests heavily on the discretion of the top civil servants, usually holding appointments as permanent secretaries or exceptionally in other senior appointments (such as the Comptroller and Auditor General).
The 'high street' in many town centres is in long-term decline. Customers are being attracted to other retail and service outlets and too frequently the headlines read: "High streets hurting as Northern Ireland is bottom of (the ) footfall league again."
Last week my colleague Paul Mac Flynn in this same column warned about the need to ensure that people are not left behind in our increasingly more probable crashing-out of the European Union without a deal.
As farmers blockade beef processing plants around the country, the ramifications are starting to move along the food chain, as it were. Beef processors are worried they will lose important retail contracts and may have to start letting staff go. The whole situation is an unfortunate, sorry mess.
It is now more likely than not that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union on October 31 without a withdrawal agreement or any negotiated settlement on future relations with the EU.
The UK will leave the EU on October 31. That statement seems unambiguous. The problem is that there is no prospect that all of the hundreds of detailed arrangements will be ready for the change that will come on November 1.
Ireland's housing market has long been a game of snakes and ladders.
We have now endured three years of turbulence since the Brexit referendum and clearly we need this resulting uncertainty to be removed as a matter of urgency.
An exit from the EU without an agreed withdrawal deal is the worst conceivable economic crisis of the year. Now an official professional commentary says that 40,000 local jobs are at risk.
A no-deal Brexit is the single biggest threat to the Northern Ireland economy since the Troubles, a retail body has claimed.
A version of the old adage 'with great power comes great responsibility' could be applied to the position the Irish Government finds itself in with several of the US tech giants right now.
Economists are stereotyped as being, let's say, not the most rock 'n roll of people. But of late, those of us working on Norther n Ireland have had reason to focus strongly on drugs, cigarettes and heavy metals.
The list of grievances at the heart of the Irish housing crisis remains very long. Twelve years after house prices started to fall and close to six years after they began rising again, the problems with housing seem as intractable and contradictory as ever.
There is a serious need for a better-informed debate about the way in which Government services are financed. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to examine this, since the Department of Finance makes it difficult to find answers to basic questions.
Despite reports of Northern Ireland's sluggish economic growth (not to mention concerns about the potential impact of Brexit), there are still a number of encouraging developments taking place within Belfast.
In recent times the Northern Ireland labour market has been performing strongly. This is evidenced by continued and sustained increases in the rate of employment and decreases in the rate of both unemployment and economic inactivity in the decade since the economic crisis.
When the CBI released the results of a survey this month which showed two thirds of leading companies across the UK are struggling to fill digital roles, unfortunately it did not surprise me.
Each year the Republic's government publishes a well-researched Draft National Risk Assessment, bringing together a wide-ranging assessment of the threats to the Irish economy. There is little surprise that top of the geopolitical risks the Irish government lists are the consequences of the departure of the UK from the EU. This is followed by a section highlighting the risks of (economic) instability in Northern Ireland.
Trouble is brewing with Brexit - real trouble. The Revenue Commissioners know it. That is why they have gone ahead and appointed 500 new staff for new customs duties, despite the March Brexit deadline being missed.
Bemis Healthcare Packaging has been operating in Campsie since about 1984. It is a subsidiary of Bemis Co Inc in Neenah, US. The Northern Ireland company also consolidates the performance of a wholly-owned subsidiary in Malaysia -Bemis Asia Pacific.
Foreign direct investment into Ireland is roaring ahead. The headline figures from the latest EY European Attractiveness Survey show just what a great run Ireland is on.
Each weekday, a typical urban area commuter spends an average of nearly an hour moving from home to workplace or school and back again. Northern Ireland is not the worst place to live when taking account of travel times and frustration but we are far from the best. The local travel scene in the larger urban centres is becoming slower and/or more congested.
The Stormont Executive supplements local social security spending to mitigate the impact of tight UK limits on spending to alleviate poverty and low living standards. The need for local adaptations has been supported by Northern Ireland ministers. This raises questions about the scale of need and also whether it is a UK problem or should appropriately be tackled as a devolved question.
The speed with which Belgian newspaper publisher Mediahuis moved to nail down its proposed takeover of Independent News & Media (publisher of this newspaper) took some by surprise. It was all over before breakfast.
Belfast is just one of six UK cities to rank on the prestigious Mercer global Quality of Living City list, having recently moved up four places to 64th, ahead of Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Dubai.
Many people may feel the recent Bombardier experience in Northern Ireland has been death by a thousand cuts. First, redundancies, then the sale of control of the C Series to Airbus, and now Bombardier's announcement that it wants to sell its operations.
Tomorrow, voters in Northern Ireland will head for the polls to elect the next generation of local councillors. Given that NI's Assembly remains in a state of deep-freeze, these elections deserve a great deal more attention and scrutiny than they have done in the past.
Northern Ireland is home to two large ambitious universities - Queen's and Ulster. They are a major asset making an important contribution to the quality of our society.
The world's central banks have spent much of the past 30 years telling us that inflation was bad and that they would not sacrifice their credibility by allowing the beast they had slain to come back to life.
For some years now, Northern Ireland has come out on top of the UK's happiness league table, with people here reporting higher degrees of happiness than people in England, Scotland and Wales.
Australian online lender UBank recently announced the launch of a direct customer 'green term deposit'. This product is focused on more environmentally aware younger customers and is marketed as allowing depositors the chance to make a positive impact on the environment.
Farmers are now realising that Brexit will mean the Irish border will become an important new awkward dimension in planning farming businesses. Farmers and their business markets already know how to cope with currency differences which were part of the EU market arrangements.
