Sport is the ultimate winner- takes-all economy where the difference between first and second place is huge. No one remembers runners-up. It is all about glory – or glory and riches – and no one wants to be second best. This is why Moyes’ exit was so abrupt; Man...
I am writing this from a small cafe just opposite the Old Bailey. For many Irishmen of my vintage, the Old Bailey is synonymous with IRA terrorists as well as innocent Irish people stitched up for crimes they didn’t commit. In my head, the Old Bailey reminds me...
The frenzy has started again. Six years after a property boom practically destroyed our economy, we are at the same nonsense again. When are we ever going to learn that buying and selling over-priced houses to each other is not going to make us rich, but will make us...
A few years ago, a reviewer decided to do a hatchet job on a book I wrote. This book was written in mid-2006. It forecast explicitly that the Irish banks were dangerously over-lending, one of the main banks was a wildly speculative “hedge fund” and would...
Look at the chart for the latest from January 2014 and notice which cities scream crisis.They are Kiev and Istanbul. Now that President Putin has made a fool of the West and proved a point, which is that Russia is the top dog in the region, let me share with you a...
Sometimes when people write about economics, it is easy to forget that behind every economic statistic is a personal story. Each sanitised economic figure when shorn of its personal testimony rarely reveals much. That is the point of aggregated data: it serves to...
