Articles: Sunday Business Post %

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

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

For the economist, one of the most dangerous urges is to fall in love with our forecast. That is to say, to become so wedded to our own world view that we are blind to the changes evident all around us and the effect we could have on our own preconceived notions about how the world works. More

Enda Kenny would cut a dash in a pair of bottle-green, high-waist parallels and a snugly-fitted Bay City Rollers bomber jacket. Or maybe a Robin Gibb, Bee Gees one-piece with the flares up, in which you could hide a six-pack? More

It is often the case that we fail to recognise the significance of events when we witness them and it is only years afterwards that we realise that this or that moment was a major turning point. In September 1988, I sat in a medieval hall in Bruges and listened to Margaret Thatcher giving the now famous Bruges speech. The speech was delivered at the opening of the academic year of the College of Europe. More

Is it just me or do you also think there is something strange about the IMF writing reports criticising itself and trying to pass it off as objective commentary? Last week we saw the IMF, one leg of the troika’s rickety three-legged stool, saying that the Irish economy was not performing well under the policy that it, the IMF, was implementing. It stated that the level of unemployment was staggering. What is actually staggering is that they should be staggered – because this high level of unemployment is the result of IMF policy here. More

Judging by the outraged reaction of Ireland’s stockbrokers – the publicity wing of the Department of Finance – Moody’s decision not to upgrade Ireland and keep us on a negative outlook was nothing short of scandalous. This indignation, in a week when we saw retail sales fall for the fourth month in a row, house prices fall for the third straight month and bank lending stall, seems a bit excessive. More

If you ever doubted that we lived in an interdependent world, the traffic chaos in south Dublin last Friday will reinforce just how fragile the ecosystem we inhabit is. Running up one rat-run after another to avoid the escalating traffic, it struck me just how similar the flows in the economic and financial world are to the flows in traffic. More

Last week saw the largest corporate transaction involving an Irish company ever. Yet it got precious little press coverage. Indeed, during the week, rather than going big on this huge business story, RTE twice carried a story about the company, Ryanair, being fined a modest €375,000 by the Dutch consumer agency, rather than focusing on the $16 billion deal announced last Tuesday. More