Articles: Banks %


June 17, 2013

The only thing keeping Irish bond prices from collapsing is the assumption that Germany will eventually pay. More

June 13, 2013

Here’s something bold. Not only is the European economy not going to recover but a secondary depression is now on the cards. The putative European recovery has evaporated – as anyone with a grasp of Leaving Cert economics would have forecast a few years ago given the policy mix adopted. More

June 10, 2013

The most striking aspect of racing through the English countryside from London to Bristol is not the green and pleasant land of William Blake’s poetry, but the abundance of Tescos. After every 20 or so minutes of countryside, a massive out-of-town giant Tesco store announces each major train station. William Blake evoked the green pastoral land of rural England as an idyll – a place where the English could build their new Jerusalem in stark contrast to what he described as the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution that he felt were destroying the English character with excessive commercialism. More

June 3, 2013

Freelancing. Being your own boss, having a portfolio career, living on your wits, independence, having no one to answer to – this all sounds good, doesn’t it? And it can be. The other side of this world is insecurity, worry, constant fretting about the next gig, undercutting everyone – starting with yourself – to get gigs, spoofing, hustling, not being able to plan and recurring financial anxiety, not to mention fear of tomorrow. More

May 27, 2013

Ireland is a country trying to compete with the rest of the world from a position of weakness and that weakness is, in the main, due to choices made by the state. More

May 20, 2013

Have we learnt nothing? The most depressing – and I mean depressing – news last week was that useless, unproductive houses in upmarket Dublin are now making well over the guide prices at auctions, at a time when useful, productive SMEs are going to the wall for want of credit and working capital. After everything we have been through, this is pathetic. It means that the same banking and property cabal that got us into this mess is flexing its dangerous muscles again. More

May 16, 2013

A friend of mine, a small business owner, is typical of many thousands of cash-strapped entrepreneurs in Ireland at the moment. More

May 13, 2013

The top 1 per cent of Americans now own a staggering 40 per cent of the country’s $54 trillion of wealth. This is an extraordinary figure. When taken together with the fact that wages as a proportion of national income have been falling in the US since the 1980s, we see a vision of a society where the average person’s income is faltering, yet the wealth of the super-rich has never been more extreme. As a result of the fall in the share of output represented by wages, the share represented by profits has gone up sharply, and corporate America is now sitting on more cash than ever before. More

May 6, 2013

Do you remember the ad in which a bloke on the top floor of a Dublin bus stands up and admits to all the passengers: “I don’t know what a tracker mortgage is”? He stands up, unsure of himself, and makes his public confession, half-petrified. You can see the relief on his face as he admits that he hasn’t a “rasher’s”. More

April 26, 2012

Financially, Spain is like Ireland but it is much, much bigger. There is little doubt that Spain will need a massive bailout. The question is, who has the money to bail out Europe’s fourth-largest economy, and when Spain topples what happens to Italy and what happens to the euro? More

Articles: Banks

I write two economics columns every week. They keep me sane and hopefully, on my toes – but you can be the judge of that! One appears in the Irish Independent on Wednesdays and the other in the Sunday Business Post every Sunday. I’ve been writing the columns for over ten years now, covering economic, financial, demographic, social and geo-political issues – and all sorts of other things that come into my head, sparked by things I’ve read, people I have spoken to or ideas I have heard, over the course of any particular week.

The world - and Ireland - is changing so rapidly that it’s impossible to run out of things to write about. Since I rarely stop writing, the articles are composed and written in the oddest of places, in bars, on trains, in my office, on buses. You name it, I’ve written in, on or under it.

One of the great joys in the week is reading the responses to my articles in the comments on this site. Thanks so much to everyone who responds, challenges, argues and even blatantly insults! This is what freedom of expression and opinion is all about: two contrasting opinions – a buyer and a seller - make a market and makes for good discussion. Imagine a world where we all agreed?

×