The women are gobsmacked to meet Clinton, whom they can hardly believe has "walked on these floors" or "breathed this air," which smells "decisive," "like confidence".
"Until we see a decisive shift in confidence, the business climate looks set to remain frail," warned Markit's Jack Kennedy.
"Working and playing against those guys really helped me with being decisive and having confidence in general," Houston said, referring to his Olympic teammates.
That decisive vote of confidence came even before the still-new nation and its neighbouring Baltic states had been welcomed into Nato, and helped underpin the region's renaissance.
Helen Dickinson of accountants KPMG said: "Summer sales, some of which started earlier this year, did little to entice consumers back in any decisive way as confidence has been affected by concerns over the future impact of fiscal changes – but spending at least continues to hold up and is likely to continue to do so, at least until the effects of Government measures begin to hit people's pockets".
With the SNP hoping to have a decisive role, both "confidence and supply" and "vote-by-vote" options have been discussed, while a formal coalition (with an agreed programme for government and ministerial jobs for the smaller party) looks very unlikely.
Another concern is related to the conceptual heterogeneity of the eight items in calculating the decisive level for confidence in the point estimate.
At this fragile stage, further attacks in Europe could deal a decisive blow to economic confidence.
Indeed, the most important potential benefit of this bigger break-up is that it could bring the euro crisis to a decisive end by restoring confidence in a smaller but sturdier single-currency area.XXVII.
