Barfly: Get your golf schuhs, Bob

WHEN Nashville businessman Bob Dennis bought Schuh for £125 million last month, his friends joked he'd only done it for the chance to play golf in Scotland.

Nothing could be further from the truth, the chief executive of US retailer Genesco, insisted last week, and he has big plans for the chain which was founded in Scotland 30 years ago. However Dennis did admit golf wasn't far from his mind during his first visit to Schuh's Livingston headquarters, admitting that the local courses looked tempting.

We'll see you on the fairways Bob.

Faint praise for transparent RBS

AFTER it was blamed for practically every sin under the sun during the banking crisis, Royal Bank of Scotland has to be grateful for any praise it receives these days. So those who have been working to improve RBS's transparency would have been cheered by a note from Shore Capital analyst Gary Greenwood on Friday, in which the company was lauded for "leading the way in terms of disclosure" since becoming the only UK bank to report a full set of quarterly figures.

But just to remind RBS chief Stephen Hester, above, that he still has a task on his hands before the wounds of 2008 are forgotten, Greenwood added that it was "still a laggard in terms of operational performance". Faint praise indeed.

No swan song for Cyprus

AS IF the possibility of US debt default wasn't enough of a weight on our minds, Stuart Thomson, chief economist at Ignis Asset Management, cheers us with the news that Cyprus will "default within 12 months".

Thomson is careful not to over-egg the pudding, however, and he puts the financial problems of the small island - famous for its associations with pop star Peter Andre, left, and EasyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou - into context.

"Cyprus is too small even to be a black cygnet," Thomson says. We won't start reaching for the panic buttons yet then.