Archive for November, 2007

It is funny how odd bits of relatively useless information that you learned in school sneak up on you. Somewhere in the back of our brains is a skip for stuff we crammed in at some stage. Every now and then some of it re-emerges. For example, last Friday night, Archimedes’ principle elbowed its way through the crowd to take an unwanted cameo role in my consciousness.

After the property gold rush, it’s now time for us to focus on small businesses in areas that make sense for the country’s economy.

The biggest lie doing the rounds here in the past few days – peddled by the same stockbrokers, estate agents, journalists and banks who told you that there would be a ‘‘soft landing’’ in the Irish property market – is that the collapse in Irish shares is merely a symptom of a greater global malaise. This is not true.

Anyone who doubted the severity of the property slump here only has to look at the shares of the Irish banks. Last night, they were all touching new lows.

The month in which your child is born can determine how successful he or she is in later life.

The other day, watching an under-sixes soccer match, as the children ran around after the ball like a swarm of demented bees and a poor coach kept telling them to ‘‘keep their shape’’, I wondered what made a good footballer. Was it talent, practice or both?

Are we about to enter a winter of discontent? History would suggest that we are. The reason is simple. The end of an economic cycle tends to be characterised by industrial unrest as the workers and company owners try to grab as big a share as possible of the declining spoils.

We may not feel it in our pockets yet, but the US sub-prime crisis is coming to a bank near you.

The New York winter uniform of stifling high turtlenecks, outlandish earmuffs and quilted jackets is back. So too are the hundreds of Irish shoppers who will spend more than half a billion dollars in the city before Christmas. The city is bracing itself for the big spending season – but all is not well.

With stock markets all over the world tumbling and Irish banks being targeted, the big question is, why do economies go into recession? Why do apparently sound economies turn down? Why is our economy heading south with tax revenues falling and housing prices slumping? Why did Japan go pear-shaped? Did it not produce the finest consumer goods in the world? How come the Asian Tigers — outlandishly praised as late as 1997 by the IMF — experience a meltdown in 1998? Why did Californian land prices plummet in the late 1980s and why is the stock market now worried about a recession in the US?

In a single week, the government has been faced with crises in many areas of Irish life.