Articles: Debt %

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

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

It is hay fever season again. I know it is because my eyes are streaming. I look at my son and see that I have passed on the nasty hay-fever gene to him too as he struggles with puffy eyes, itchy throat and constant sneezing and wheezing. For the next while, we’ll be watching the pollen count like hawks, but the hay-fever season will pass. It always does. More

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

The new chief economist of the Central Bank stated the obvious last week when he said that there would have to be debt forgiveness on many mortgages that simply can’t be paid. Someone who signed a contract in good faith during boom conditions, when income and the price of the house was rising, simply cannot honour that contract if his income has shrunk and the price of the asset has collapsed. Many tens of thousands of Irish people simply do not have the money to pay the mortgage now and certainly won’t have it when the next round of tax increases are signalled at the Budget. More

When all the people you read every week for information are talking about the same report, you know that you should read it. From Paul Krugman on the left to John Mauldin on the right, some of my favourite reads of the week are citing a McKinsey Consulting report on global debt. More

The European debt crisis is moving swiftly to the next phase following the downgrade of France and the collapse of the Greek negotiations with its creditors last Friday night. More

Exactly three years ago this week, this column argued that this financial crisis might result in Ireland (and others) leaving the euro. The argument was not based on any ideological/political antipathy to the currency but on some basic economic analysis about how debt crises and associated recessions end. More

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I remember it so distinctly. Mum allowed me to stay up to watch it even though it was a school night and it meant going to bed after midnight. More

By playing hardball with the French and Germans this weekend, Greece has bravely sparked a liberation which could topple the eurozone as we know it – and not a minute too soon More