Prudential's announcement that it will outsource much of its UK back office to Capita earned a rare pat on the back from the unions and set a new record for misuse of the words "deliver" and "delivery" - terms reserved, under the FT's strict style guidelines, for babies and postal services. What is so special about this package?

That is easier to explain for Capita than for the Pru. As the largest life and pensions contract struck by the support services group, it gives the company real mass in the sector, and in India, with the transfer of part of the Pru's operation in Mumbai and 1,250 staff, on top of 1,750 UK employees.

Capita could arguably squeeze more value out of the acquisition of a smaller administrative operation. The group claims to lavish attention and investment on unloved paper-pushers, but the Pru's mature life and pensions administration was too important for the insurer to neglect. Indeed, one option was for the Pru to keep the unit in-house. That might not have been popular with staff, however. Closed-book administration is a one-way cul-de-sac. The only option for Prudential would have been to slash costs as business literally died away. Capita is not making any promises, other than to respect the letter and spirit of UK employment regulation, but the size of its back-office insurance operation offers comfort to employees and explains the cautious welcome from Unite, the union.

Prudential, in turn, gets the certainty of a 32 per cent reduction in cost per policy - and takes its single largest step towards its target of £195m of annual cost savings by the end of 2010. Who is left in the Prudential UK front office, though? The all-important actuaries, marketing folk, the PruHealth and PruProtect teams, and managers of the bulk annuity and lifetime mortgage businesses. Hardly the leviathan that once dominated High Holborn and, from there, the UK insurance sector. Nick Prettejohn, the division's chief executive, is making good progress tackling what once seemed an intractable challenge, but surely this is a brand that, in the jargon of the time, could deliver more for the group.

Bad, but not yet awful

The chief executive of one large UK retailer has been warning publicly about the uncertain economic outlook since last November. "By now, I rather wish the bad news would arrive," he commented earlier this week.

Ask DSG International, which owns Currys and PC World chains, or Signet, the group behind H Samuel, and they will tell you it is already here, and with a vengeance. DSG warned last month about an imminent drop in underlying interim profits, so in that respect, its confirmation of half-year results on Wednesday held no new information. But it came on the heels of Tuesday's warning from Signet, the world's biggest jeweller, which has started to see the customer lethargy already detected at its Jared and Kay chains in the US bleed into the UK.

That the US economy is starting to feel the chill from the subprime crisis is no secret. Take Wolseley (NYSE: WOS - News) . The building supplies group started to worry last year. It was shedding jobs at Stock Building Supply, its worst-exposed US business, as early as January and once the additional round of cuts announced on Wednesday is complete a third of Stock's workforce will have gone.

Yet while Wolseley remains nervous about the UK, it is not yet battening down the hatches at its builders' merchants - hatches being, as it happens, one of the many products it sells through specialist distribution hubs such as Parts Centerand Build Center. Its consumer-facing chain of bathroom specialists, Bathstore.com, had rather a good first quarter to the end of October, at a time when the door to easy credit was supposedly being slammed in the face of many British customers.

When a chief executive such as Wolseley's Chip Hornsby, with nearly three decades in this business, says this is the most difficult market to read since he started his career, you have to pay attention. But while the impact of the credit squeeze on the real US economy is now palpable, at least in the UK, uncertainty remains the rule.

Lighttouchregulation.com

The Financial Services Authority's reach can be impressive but also, at times, perplexing. Wednesday's reiteration of the message that financial firms' websites should be "fair, clear and not misleading" is uncontroversial. But you have to wonder whether 130 visits to 77 firms' websites - over 12 months- constitutes a thorough review of online promotional activity. Most of us visit that many sites in an evening just buying Christmas presents.

Dig deeper, however, and it is clear that far from encouraging the FSA to spend more time on such work, we should be urging the agency to refocus its team of cyber-surfers on to more fruitful areas. The watchdog's parallel review of "over 200" sponsored links barely peered over the edge of the bottomless pit that contains all those too-good-to-be-true insurance offers displayed by search engines. And, in submitting financial promoters to forensic analysis would we rather the Canary Wharf gumshoes were out arresting insider dealers and scam-merchants or taking otherwise law-abiding firms to task for "poor use of font, position, colour, [and] text boxes"?