Sunday Business Post

The only thing that can stop the euro from breaking apart in the short term is old-fashioned capital controls. Otherwise, more and more money will flow from the periphery to the core. The weaker the peripheral countries become, the higher the risk of political instability and the greater the risk of a change in policy….

When I was a boy, there was a very popular game played by all the kids on our road. It was called “clackers”. It involved two plastic balls on two strings tied together at the top. The balls hit off each other with force making a “clack” noise. Once one ball hit the other, the…

Let’s talk about Germany. What does Germany want? Why is it important? How does what the Germans want affect us? This week, we have an American flavour to the column because I am writing this from southern California, where I have just had the pleasure of listening to probably the most important player in the…

Never mind the likes of Messi, Ronaldo or Drogba; never mind Barcelona, Chelsea or Real. In our house, when it comes to football at the weekends, there is only one team: the Cabinteely FC under-10s. Every Saturday morning, under the watchful eye of Michael, our Scottish manager who is Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish and David…

There is a famous scene in the 1976 film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, starring Clint Eastwood as the eponymous hero. During a particularly brilliant exchange, the bounty hunter Fletcher, hot on the heels of Wales, comes out with an inspired put-down to the cowardly senator who is trying to pull the wool over his eyes….

Have you ever gone to a gig so ridiculously funny that you can’t actually communicate with the person beside you? You are reduced to grimacing; words just can’t come out, tears and snorts, yes, but words, no. When I finally pulled myself together at Tommy Tiernan’s latest show in Vicar Street, it struck me that…

It’s the day of the Easter Bunny – the ancient sign of fertility – and “breeding like rabbits” is exactly what we are up to. Traditionally, fertility is celebrated around the spring equinox and, given the fecundity of rabbits, they became a symbol of fertility and of Easter. The census, which came out last week,…

Have you noticed how expensive petrol is these days? It now costs over €100 to fill up an average family car. In Ussher’s Quay the other day, there was a tailback of cars because a petrol station decided to offer a cut-price deal on petrol. Why is the price of fuel going up? Lots of…

Could the China that Enda Kenny is visiting this week enter a recession in the next year or two? Yes, a recession, not a gradual slowdown, but a recession. This might seem a preposterous suggestion, given what we know has happened in the past ten years. But that is precisely the point. The recent past…

The US stock market hit another post-crash high on Friday and it got me thinking not of America but of Japan – one of America’s giant creditors. As the US stock market has been rallying, the Japanese yen has been collapsing. Why might this be? This time last year, Japan was struck by a tsunami,…