In my experience, institutional involvement rarely guarantees anything, while the idea that the sort of punters who play the Alternative Investment Market need protecting from their own stupidity is just plain patronising Caveat emptor is all that's needed to govern AIM. All else only undermines AIM's high-risk, potentially high-reward purpose. I, for one, will not be complaining of regulatory failure if the present exuberance ends in tears.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk. AT&T, America's oldest communications company, whose roots stretch back to the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, is selling itself to a rival which used to be part of its empire. Today, the fall has been narrowed to just 16 per cent, which is better news for investors - provided, of course that what Mr O'Leary is telling them today is any more believable than what he was saying back then.Undermining AIMAt the height of the South Sea Bubble, a large sum of money was raised on the stock market "for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".

There are echoes of this exaggerated exuberance in the present proliferation of cash shells floating on the Alternative Investment Market. Yet the London Stock Exchange is surely overreacting by proposing that no company raising less than £3m should be allowed to float.The purpose of this floor is to ensure the issue is large enough to attract institutional money, which in the LSE's view should in turn allow for some degree of corporate governance control. Perversely, the soaring price of oil has also helped, allowing Ryanair to keep its fares higher than they would have been were it not for the successive fuel surcharges introduced by his full-service rivals.The Ryanair share price nosedived after Ryanair's warning a year ago, halving in value at one point. The new statistics seemed to confirm what the sceptics were saying: the more money the Government spends, the less efficient the public sector becomes. That's not at all what the doctor had ordered.The ONS announced yesterday that it would be incorporating a further nine of the report's final recommendations into the figures, while continuing to assess and consult on the others. All nine relate to measuring educational output, where there are similar concerns to those expressed over the NHS. For instance, if government spending is causing class sizes to get smaller, does that count as an increase or decrease in output and productivity?The revisions will be ready for publication by the end of April but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be published then The imminence of the election makes it all very political.

True, the sector has experienced some turbulence - four start-up airlines have crashed completely and another four would-be budget carriers have been forced to slash capacity. But this scarcely amounts to a bloodbath.The two big no-frills operators, Ryanair and easyJet, have emerged more or less unscathed, with capacity, traffic, market share and profits all up on a year ago.The main effect of Mr O'Leary's dire warning a year ago was to dissuade mini-me airlines from entering the market, sure in the knowledge that, however suicidal their prices, Ryanair had the balance-sheet strength not only to meet them, but beat them. If the result is good news for the Government, then Len Cook, head of the ONS, would be accused of deliberately trying to boost the Government's electoral prospects by publishing. Likewise he could be accused of burying the bad news if he fails to publish statistics that show extra government spending on education in a poor light. Now who was it who said there are lies, damned lies and statistics?Bloodbath cancelledThe "bloodbath" predicted for low-cost airlines by the Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary a year ago looks to have been restricted largely to his own share price and even that is looking a lot perkier now.