Amcor really needed a circuit breaker and it needed a new chief
executive – and yesterday’s appointment of Ken MacKenzie seems to have
satisfied both requirements, says Elizabeth Knight in the SMH.
MacKenzie will quickly find himself enmeshed in a global powder keg
which is about to reshape the international business community, says Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.
How he handles it will play a large role in determining the success of
the bold new strategy the internal candidate sold to the Amcor board in
the CEO selection process. Amcor has bucked the trend in Australia by
appointing an insider, says the AFR’s Chanticleer.

The
context of Coles Myer’s next five-year strategic plan will be radically
different from the one that framed the present plan, says Stephen Bartholomeusz in The Age.
The next strategic review, which is about to get under way, won’t be
about survival but improvement. It will be about aspiration rather than
desperation.

Labor’s opposition to tax cuts are giving Tax Commissioner Micheal Carmody a major headache, reports Allesandra Fabro in the AFR(subscription).
The commissioner has apparently told Peter Costello he can’t implement
the new tax thresholds before the cuts are enacted, but if he waits
until the bill is passed by the new Senate in August he will be faced
with the challenge of reimbursing people for extra tax they shouldn’t
have paid. Also in the Fin, Gina Rinehart’s attempts to find
backers for her massive $2.16 billion Hope Downs iron ore project in WA
have proved about as successful as her legal squabbles with her
estranged stepmother Rose Porteous. So far, they’ve come to nought.

And Schapelle Corby’s white knight, Gold Coast businessman Ron Bakir, has been facing some battles of his own, reports Colin Kruger in the SMH.
The face of Mad Ron’s mobile phone business, Bakir was bankrupted in
2002 and has yet to pay off his creditors. The latest failure was Crazy
Ron’s Communications, which was put into liquidation last month and
given little chance of paying $1.4 million owed to business rival Crazy
John’s, the Australian Tax Office and others.

The Wall Street Journal
reports how a news story from an obscure, semi-official Chinese news
service roiled the world’s trillion-dollar-a-day foreign exchange
market and sparked panicky emails and phone calls among currency
traders and fund managers from Singapore to Stockholm as the US dollar
tumbled earlier this week. How a reporter for the China News Service
managed to set off such chaos – and losses for traders caught off guard
by the market’s gyrations – is a tale of the modern electronic news
media gone awry, says Andrew Browne in the WSJ. “It really
freaked the market,” said Claudio Piron, the Asia currency strategist
for JP Morgan who was on the firm’s trading desk in Singapore when the
story broke.

On Wall Street, US stocks feel
sharply overnight with blue chips suffering the steepest losses. The
Dow Jones Industrial closed down 110 points, or 1.1%, at 10,189,
marking the seventh triple-digit decline for the benchmark index over
the past month. MarketWatch has a full report here.