Archive for November, 2009

The default of Dubai World – announced on Thanksgiving Day, when most Americans were on holiday – showed us what the second leg of this great crisis was all about.

Last Friday’s 9.55am train from Limerick pulled out on time, hurtling towards the ‘Junction’. As we sped past the waterlogged land on a beautiful morning, commuters on the train were going about their business as normal, reading about the treacherous Thierry Henry in the paper and chatting to friends on the phone.
As we arrived at…

Did you know that our country’s housing wealth has shrunk at a rate of €142.8m per day since the peak of the boom in 2007? This is a catastrophic figure because housing wealth was one of the key drivers of spending, and domestic spending is what kept the dole queues so low in the boom years.

Is the world heading for deflation or inflation? If you talk to serious investors and long-term followers of economic trends, this is the big question. As in the boom – when the major conundrum was whether we could continue borrowing and spending – the experts are divided again.

Sometimes we can be an extremely vindictive society. In times of trouble, there’s often a dreadful clamour for vengeance. As a general rule, it seems sensible to avoid those who seek recrimination and punishment for those who made mistakes; although righteous indignation may satisfy a visceral yearning, vengeance and outrage don’t move things on one bit.

David will be touring around Ireland over the next month giving talks followed by a Q&A session for his new book, Follow The Money. All are welcome.
Dublin, 17th November
Waterstone’s, Dawson Street, Dublin (google map)
Time: 6.30pm
Limerick, 19th November
O’Mahony’s Bookshop, 120 O’Connell St, Limerick
Time: 8pm
Cork, 23rd November
Accounting & Finance Society, UCC
Time: 8.00pm
Postponed: to 3rd December
Cork,…

Which one of the two big banks will be nationalised first? This sounds fanciful, but events in the last few days suggest that the perception of the Irish banks has changed profoundly – for the worse – and nationalisation is on the cards. This means we now face the possibility that we will have the guarantee, Nama and the nationalisation of one of the big two banks all at once.

On Monday afternoon, I came across an old lady sobbing as she scribbled a few loving notes onto a small wooden cross. Seeing that I noticed her, she wiped the tears and tried to pull herself together in true Scottish fashion, quite prim, but stern. She brushed down her pleated tartan skirt and tucked her scarf in around her collar to keep out the vicious north wind, which howled through the Scott Monument at the Garden of Remembrance in the centre of Edinburgh.

Over the past few days, we have been exposed to the thinking of the Department of Finance. It is quite a scary world, but one worth delving into. This crisis has exposed – no matter who is the sitting Minister for Finance – the strange and convoluted logic of the mandarins, the permanent government, who run the country. In truth, any sitting minister has only a four-year lease on power; the ‘mandarins of Merrion Street’ own the freehold.