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The article focuses on efforts by businesses and interest groups to phase out the one dollar bill and replace it with a dollar coin. It states the U.S. is one of the few large economies that issues low-denomination bank notes (LDBN), with Canada and Great Britain having replaced their LDBN before the turn of the 21st century. It comments that lobbyists are trying to convince Congress to switch to dollar coins to reduce the deficit and mentions a Government Accountability Office study about the savings.

The article discusses economist and Harvard University faculty member Kenneth Rogoff's claim that if nations such as the U.S. and Great Britain scrapped their physical forms of currency it would help the governments collect additional taxes, fight crime, and develop more efficient monetary policies. Computer software company Apple Inc.'s "contactless payment" system is mentioned, along with cash and the amount of paper monetary notes and coins in circulation. The World Bank is examined.

The debate over "offshoring" has been brewing since a study by Forrester, a research group, in 2002 claimed that 3.3m white-collar American jobs (500,000 of them in IT) would shift offshore to countries such as India by 2015. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, talks about a "new and powerful global labour arbitrage" that has led to an accelerating transfer of high-wage jobs to India and elsewhere. He reckons this is adding to the bias towards jobless recoveries in western economies. Multinationals may in future do original R&D in low-cost places, but for the moment most of the jobs on the move are the paper-based back-office ones that can be digitalised and telecommunicated anywhere around the world, plus more routine telephone inquiries that are increasingly being bundled together into call centres. The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The main advantage of shifting business operations to India and similar low-cost countries comes from a combination of lower wages and the improvement in the quality and price of international telecommunications. But the benefits of offshoring are not confined to lower costs. For one thing, offshoring allows companies to work round-the-clock shifts, ferrying data back and forth from one place to another as the sun sets. For another, it allows them to rethink the way they solve IT problems.

The author compares the reactions of the U.S. and the British media to the baring of singer Janet Jackson's breast on live television during the Super Bowl half-time. Competition, this newspaper believes, has beneficial effects pretty much everywhere. This week's British newspapers may lead higher-minded readers to disagree. On February 1st, a breast belonging to Janet Jackson, a singer, escaped during Super Bowl half-time. High-brow American papers reported the incident, but with no photo. Low-brow papers pictured the recapture, but not the breast. Michael Powell, head of the Federal Communications Commission, called it a "classless, crass and deplorable stunt". There is to be an official inquiry. This seems odd to Britons, whose smaller broadcast channels keep themselves afloat on a sea of smut. Not only tabloid newspapers, but also the Times and even the Daily Telegraph (average age of reader 55) showed the star's spangled nipple, waving joyfully in the wind. Why the difference? Maybe because secular Britons are no longer shockable, while Americans have clung to their religion and associated puritanism. The Economist, of course, deplores the degradation of the British press. As a service to American readers, who should know how low it has fallen, we reprint the picture below.

According to a paper published in Science on January 9th, levels of organochlorines in farmed salmon are so high in Scottish output that people should eat less than half a portion of salmon a month. Organochlorines are unpleasant chemicals such as dioxins and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) produced by industry that hang around in the environment. They accumulate in animals, concentrating in the fatty parts. The authors of the Science paper looked at 700 salmon from around the world. Europe's salmon came off worst overall; among European salmon, Scottish fish did particularly badly. Yet America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA) think there is nothing to worry about, so long as people eat the amounts they recommend. Contaminant levels reported in the study are easily within guidelines set by the FDA, the World Health Organisation and the European Commission. So why did the authors of the Science paper come to such a different conclusion? Because they based their findings on the method of assessing toxicological risk used by a different regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), to advise sport fishermen how much of the fish they catch they can eat.

The article offers business news briefs. The U.S. President Barack Obama's administration announced changes to the country's financial regulatory system in a white paper. Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, stated Great Britain's central bank needed more power to settle its regulatory responsibilities. The European Central Bank reported that losses at banks in the euro area could increase by $283 billion by the end of the year 2010.

It is a wise child that knows his own father. Genotyping means a wise father can know his own child. Testing a cheek swab from a baby can easily clear the matter up. This is a booming business in Britain, where around 10,000 such tests are thought to be carried out privately each year. Robin Baker, an academic-turned-author, reviewed the available data a few years ago and estimated that as many as 10% of children may not have been sired by their supposed fathers. That's why there was talk, in the run-up to the publication of the genetics white paper, of forbidding suspicious men from doing this without the mother's consent. In the event, the government decided against it, and opted merely to propose banning taking unauthorized DNA samples. This prohibition (which would not extend to the police) would avoid cases such as the one in America in which investigators employed by Kirk Kerkorian, a Hollywood mogul, got hold of the DNA of Steve Bing, a socialite, to try to establish whether Mr Bing was the father of Mr Kerkorian's wife's child.