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March 29th, 2006
Be warned: the end of cheap oil will kill suburban dreams
Every Saturday throughout the early 1960s, a dull drone could be heard over the Colorado plains. The light aircraft flew low, at around 2,000ft. Inside, the pilot plotted future roads, suburban housing schemes and new business parks. Ray Kroc was looking for cheap land and was planning a revolution for suburban America even before the suburbs existed. Kroc, the mastermind behind McDonald’s, soon graduated to helicopters and by the 1980s, the company was one of the largest purchasers of commercial satellite photography, using it to predict suburban sprawl from outer space
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March 26th, 2006
A glimpse of Ireland’s future
Do you want to live in an Ireland with another million people, with traffic gridlock like Mexico City, where 20 per cent of the population are immigrants, where house prices are double or treble what they are today and where the suburbs stretch right across the country?
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March 19th, 2006
Financial markets attempt to stop the runaway money train
In the past few weeks, the world�s financial markets have begun to worry again about the huge amount of money sloshing around the globe. So many assets have risen in value simply because there are billions of dollars of excess money seeping into every nook and cranny of the financial system. Where is the money coming from and how can central banks manage the asset bubbles building?
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March 15th, 2006
The no sweat Irish: Money for nothing and their kicks for free
In the late 1980s, Bruges University was full of European students. Those from Ireland were in their early 20s and were marked out for export. They had all graduated, were doing post-graduates and weren’t planning to go back to Ireland. They were also the youngest at college by far – at least five, if not ten years younger than their European counterparts. The Germans, in particular, were much older and most of them had no intention of getting a job after they left. This was just another step in their education. . Who paid for all this? Their parents or the State or both, apparently.
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March 12th, 2006
Ireland’s kamikaze capitalism
Picture the scene. You walk into the library two days before your finals. Everything is a blur and that horrible pre-exam fear dominates. What if the wrong questions come up? Where are the photocopied notes you snaffled yesterday?
You sit down for some desperate last minute cramming. The bloke next to you, who you vaguely recognise from your class, takes out a Japanese dictionary. He thumbs it confidently.
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March 5th, 2006
Beware of Khrushchev’s shoe
Forty-five years ago, Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, took off his shoe and banged on the table at the UN General Assembly, boasting to the astounded dignitaries: ��We will bury you.�
He was talking about economics.
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March 1st, 2006
Welcome to the underclass
The blame for Saturday’s riot seems now to be local football hooligans drawn from what has been described as a feral, aggrieved underclass which has, in the economic effervescence of the past few years, been ignored. If this is the case, we had better get used to them because this track-suited, white Irish underclass will grow significantly. And the growth of this suburban underclass – mirroring developments in the US and the UK – are likely to remain firmly beyond mainstream politics.
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