With Toyota preparing a global recall of its new Prius and rolling out a fix to eight other models with a brake problem, the world’s largest automaker has its work cut out to regain the confidence of consumers.

The company has already reported a 16 percent sales drop for January, allowing Ford and GM to surge past it in the U.S. market. And the news has only got worse for Toyota this month.

So we’re curious: who would buy a Toyota right now? Take our polls and leave us a comment. If you’re sticking with the brand, tell us why.

So here's my problem for you. The year that Safire passed away in -- excuse me -- in which Safire passed away, is nearly always expressed verbally as two-thousand-and-nine. Occasionally, a  person might say just two-thousand-nine, but that is just sloppy. It is rarely, if ever, expressed as twenty-oh-nine.

What year are we in now, then? Is it two-thousand-and-ten as the past decade's use would suggest? Or is it twenty-ten, as in ninteeen-sixty-eight and so on?

Before you answer, however, consider this:

• 2000 was inevitably referred to as the-year-two-thousand.
• 1907 was occasionally  spoken of as nineteen-hundred-and-seven but usually as nineteen-oh-seven.
• 1066 is always ten-sixty-six, never one-thousand-and-sixty-six.
• The film '2001: A Space Odyssey' has always been two-thousand-and-one.
• Its follow up, '2010', followed up as two-thousand-and-ten, at least as far as I can recall.
• Britain's Olympics in 2012 are usually referred to as twenty-twelve.
• Sometimes they are referred to as the two-thousand-and-twelve  Games.

Do not dimiss this serious matter. There are 990 years to get through before the-year-three-thousand and we have future generations to consider.

True, some people might prefer to immerse themselves in a rollicking sea tale from Patrick O'Brian or a good old  Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery. But we know that Reuters blogs' readers are a discriminating lot with a keen understanding of and passion for finance. So here is Dylan's list of six must-reads:

1. Manias, Panics and Crashes, by Charles P. Kindleberger;
2. The Essays of Warren Buffet, edited by Richard Cunningham;
3. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefevre;
4. Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb;
5. The Case against the Fed, by Murray Rothbard;
6. Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, eds Kahneman, Slovic and
Tversky.

So what is your reading list? Tell us what you would include  and why.

He calls the campaign stupid.

But critics of the show loathe what they call the "karaoke" of X Factor and thousands have backed the push to get an anti-establishment track by American rockers Rage Against the Machine up into the top slot next week.

The band's guitarist Tom Morello told the BBC: "I think people are just fed-up of being spoonfed some overblown sugary ballad that sits on top of the charts. It’s a little dose of anarchy for the holidays, it’s good for the soul.”

It's good for Sony too, analysts have noted, since both records are on its label.

Critics of the Internet campaign note that record numbers of viewers watched last weekend's X Factor final and millions voted for McElderry. If so many people like him, why should he not be No. I they ask.

What do you think?

Åslund, who is also co-author with Andrew Kuchins of "The Russian Balance Sheet", reckons the Russia of Putin and Medvedev is just not worthy of inclusion alongside Brazil, India and China  in the list of blue-chip economic powerhouses. He writes:

The country's economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that one must ask whether it is entitled to have any say at all on the global economy, compared with the other, more functional members of its cohort.

I have just returned from Moscow, which is always dreary around this season. But this year, the mood among the capital's eloquent liberal economists has hit a new low. For the last seven years, Russia has undertaken no significant economic reforms. Instead, the state has been living off oil and gas, like a lucky but undeserving rentier."

Economically, Åslund has the numbers on his side. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Russian economic will contract by 6.7 percent this year, while China will grow 8.5 percent and India 5.4 percent. There is less of a case for Brazil, with a contraction of 0.7 percent projected, but it is still doing far better than Russia.

But the BRICs concept is not just about economics. As mentioned, it is a marketing device to urge investors to focus on the big emerging players. From an investment standpoint, it could be argued that Russia is leading the BRICs. Its stock market is up 128 percent this year versus around 80 percent for the other three.

At very least, however, Russia's economic underperformance and stock market outperformance does suggest it is the outlier of the group.

Not one to sit and around and just gripe about things, Murdoch says he might pull News Corp’s news from Google’s Web search results and list the stories on Microsoft’s Bing. The catch is that Microsoft would pay for the service, giving Murdoch a fresh revenue stream.

The problem is that many news organizations are fed their Web audience via Google search. If viewer rates fall, so too, the theory says, will ad dollars.

If it works, however, you can bet big dollars that other publishers and content providers will follow suit.

What do you think? Will Murdoch’s gamble work?  Should search engines pay for the privilege of listing a publisher’s content?

Leave your comments below.

Are we now getting blasé about the latest crisis? Not so long ago, perfectly respectable economists and financial analysts were talking about a new Great Depression. The world was on the brink, it was said. Now, though, consensus appears to be that it is all over bar the shouting. The world is safe.

Wealth managers at Barclays have gone as far as telling their clients to get over it.

Move past the crisis .... The past year's events were deeply traumatic for most investors, but now is the time to move on, and take a more "business as usual" approach ...."

Such bullishness may not be comforting to the record numbers of jobless in parts of the world, but it is bordering on consensus. It is left to the likes of perma-bears such as  Nouriel Roubini to try to burst the bubble of optimism on which many are floating. The economist began one of his latest articles bluntly:

Think the worst is over? Wrong.

Roubini's main point is that unemployment is likely to get worse rather than better and that many U.S. jobs that have been lost will not come back.

Now, there can obviously be a disconnect between markets and economics, but the former tends to be based on assumptions about the latter. So which is right? Are we out of the woods? Or should Supertramp be firing up their keyboards again?

But it’s also intriguing to Germans and German media. Why isn’t Obama here? Berlin loves (most) American presidents — going back to John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Is there more than meets the eye to Obama’s decision not to come?

Obama, of course, wanted to speak at the Brandenburg Gate in July 2008, when he was only the Democratic candidate. Merkel intervened to prevent that from happening — he ended up giving the speech a few km away at the Victory Column. Tomorrow, Obama could have spoken at the Brandenburg Gate.

Obama did come back to Berlin after that speech in front of 200,000 spectators as presidential candidate (www.reuters.com) last year — but only as a wax figure at Madame Tussauds (photo) The life-like creation was included at Madame Tussauds in Berlin, just a few blocks east of the Brandenburg Gate, in January.

So what do you think? Should Obama have come to Berlin?

Take part in our poll and look for results and more information on our Berlin Wall live blog: http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2009/11/ 04/the-berlin-wall-20/

Check out the headline at the bottom left of the Sunday Times front page. The man the London paper calls the most powerful banker on Earth says he is "just a banker 'doing God’s work'" .

The report says Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein"proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns" .

Goldman Sachs looks set to pay about $20 billion in bonuses for its top traders this year, at a time when the fallout from last year's financial crisis is still being felt and the United States unemployment rate has hit 10.2 percent, a 26-1/2-year high.

In his defence, Blankfein said in the interview: "We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle ... We have a social purpose."