Healthy body healthy mind, so it's muesli and yoghurt followed by a protein shake for breakfast. Two hours at the gym on the bike and treadmill before a sauna and a freshen up writes Emmanuel Kenning, reporter at Professional Broking.

Well the sauna bit is true but that was thanks to the Central Line in London on an August day. Oh, and the new reporter at PB is also true but the David Beckham-esque fitness regime may have to wait, despite my good intentions, just a little while longer.

My first month has been a flurry of introductory emails and phone calls. The first one to Biba had set the tone and I'm pleased to say their friendly, helpful advice proved to be the norm for a newcomer.

Personality

Having started to come to terms over the past fortnight with the alphabet soup of TCFs and xmls I'm happy to get my head down to typing away. As I review my notes and follow up key points I feel my first impressions confirmed. I know I've joined a personality rich industry where people have a drive and ambition to promote not only their companies but also the value of the broking profession as a whole.

Keen to display my new found knowledge a mix of news and features work keeps my fingers moving enthusiastically on the keyboard as the days tick by through the week. And to top it all on Tuesday evening I spend a couple of hours in the company of Shane Warne.

The Ashes were yet to be won and Warney was in good form regaling his audience with anecdotes of practical jokes from his time in cricket. Kevin Petersen it appears was one player that Mr Warne was always keen to get one over both on and off the pitch. Thanks to Allianz I have the chance to listen to the leg-spinner's thoughts on how England should approach the Oval Test. Five days later it is clear that, thankfully, someone else was listening too as the week comes to a perfect end, just a shame about Ipswich Town.

Allianz competition 

You may have seen an online competition for two readers' children to visit Munich's football stadium and train with Bayern Munich's coaches courtesy of Allianz. We can reveal the winners are the respective sons of Peter Wickham, associate director, sales and marketing, at Towergate Patrick and Stephen Hepburn, managing director at Maestro Insurance Services. The lads fly out this week and we will report back in October on how they found it.

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Andrew Tjaardstra, editor of PB, writes: the economists are undecided, the politicians are naturally divided and the Bank of England fluctuates between gloomy and hopeful news on a regular basis; however, is this the week we came out of recession?

As France and Germany climbed out of recession in the second quarter (both up 0.3%), the UK saw a GDP decline of 0.8% between April and June. With a gloomy prognosis of inflation falling below 1%, the governor of the Bank of England said this week "the recession appears to be deeper than the MPC thought likely at the time of the May report . . ."

It was not all doom and gloom though from the governor as he added: "It is likely that output stabilised in the middle of this year, and business surveys and other short-run indicators suggest that growth is more likely than not to resume over the next few quarters." Wherever you look there are contradictory signs with unemployment rising, but manufacturing output also rising in the last quarter. However, it is almost safe to say the worst of the recession is over, assuming we don't have a double dip recession, and there could be some growth possible in the third quarter; but we have a long way to go before we can celebrate and start to pay back some of our debt burdens through increased tax revenues.

 
Some though have not lost out as a result of the recession. Whilst we see across the board pay freezes, budgets cut and a great deal of stress for businesses, it appears those at the top of controlling our money supply will not lose out come rain or shine. Why is there not some kind of negative 'bonus' (a minus?) for when things go utterly wrong and our bankers' bad bets need government assistance to bail them out? How often do we hear genuine remorse from bankers for their mistakes? As the Bank of England rate remains static at 0.5%, banks have a duty to pass on lower interest rates to hard pressed borrowers and companies. They lent poorly in the boom and now they should not penalise hard working families and businesspeople simply to beef up their balance sheets. We deserve better from the banking sector.

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