Embarrassing things people said or wrote during the Celtic Tiger pyramid scheme

1

Fuck off and die :lol:

Dismal science merchants only happy when we’re poor
By Liam Collins

Sunday July 08 2007

BERTIE Ahern got it absolutely right, even if his phraseology was unfortunate, when he said, “Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity, I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide.”

He was speaking about those practitioners of the ‘dismal science’, the economists and their more alarmist fellow-travellers in the media who want to talk Ireland out of its boom because it does not suit a mythical semi-socialist future where we would all be equally poor together.

Like over-enthusiastic football supporters, these people seem ready to cheer when the ball goes into the goalmouth - even if it is an own goal.

Can it be a coincidence that most of those house-price-collapse cheerleaders are themselves cosseted in the public service, with their safe salaries, their benchmarking and their fat pensions funded from the very taxpayers they’re doing their best to stampede into a crisis?

The State-funded Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI) set the stalled ball rolling again last week when it regurgitated a hysterical rant from an academic who had the audacity to accuse those in the property business of “wishful thinking” because they remained optimistic about the future of house prices.

Professor Morgan Kelly, from the bloated campus of University College, Dublin (UCD), first jumped on the property bandwagon on December 21, 2006, with his paper, Irish House Prices: Gliding into the Abyss?When not too many people paid much attention to his thesis, the state ‘think tank’ reissued his gloom-laden forecast under the new guise of academic research. It came with complicated formulae, big words and long, hard-to-read paragraphs - but the same dismal conclusions.

Before that, we had commentator George Lee with his best doom-laden voice predicting that the end is nigh.

Journalist Richard Curran from the Sunday Business Post did his best to spice up the gloomy scenario with his own punchy tabloid-meets-Hollywood televised treatment of meltdown in the million-euro suburbs.

And, of course, we’ve been waiting years for David McWilliams’s wish-fulfilment on the property crash to happen. Most of the Pope’s Children appear to have abandoned their marriages, snorted a few lines of cocaine and retired to the nearest wine bar to drown their sorrows as they wait for the property crash that will ruin them.

Even further back - and it’s now so long since I first heard UCD’s Professor Brendan Walsh predict a “soft landing” in the property market that the good professor has since retired and the economy and the property market have powered ahead in the intervening years.

When most of the middle-class PAYE workers go to bed at night and dream a little of their good fortune, the only tangible thing of value they have is their house.

They may live in a modern liberal democracy, have a good standard of living and children who don’t have to emigrate to find work, but that’s not the same as knowing that their little plot has gone from being worth €90,000 to being worth €900,000 in the last 15 years.

While readers might find Professor Morgan Kelly’s, On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices, published last week by the ESRI, tedious, with sub-headings such as Fundamental Regressions and Macroeconomic Consequences, they should really go back to his Gliding Into the Abysspaper of just six months before which is, in its own way, a brilliant piece of tabloid scholarship, to find out exactly what he’s saying.

“We can expect the biggest falls in apartments as speculators try to sell before getting roasted alive, and in the dismal outlying towns with long commutes to Dublin,” wrote the professor. “For many with 100 per cent mortgages on apartments that have fallen in value by €150,000, it will make sense to leave the keys in the door and relocate to London for a while.”

Residents of those “dismal towns” may wonder why the ERSI is using public funds to insult them, but that’s another day’s work.

Professor Kelly, unlike some of the other gloomy economists, has no difficulty actually measuring the dramatic fall in house pricesfor the ERSI.

“If the experience of economies like ours are anything to go by, we may be looking forward to large and prolonged falls in real house prices of the order of 40-50 per cent, and a collapse of house building activity,” he says.

He goes on to say that the Irish housing boom “is a bubble, pure and simple” and the reason for his thesis is that rents have fallen while mortgages are rising. “Why pay a mortgage on an empty apartment that has stopped rising in value? As speculators rush for the exit, prices will crash,” he says, comparing Ireland with Finland and Holland.

“Second, if prices stop rising, it makes no sense to buy a house,” he says, debunking the myth that every Irish person has some pre-Famine memory of being landless.

“Compared with mortgages, rents are ridiculously low,” says the professor. “For €2,000 a month you can pay a mortgage on something in a muddy field on the wrong side of Celbridge, without nearby shops or schools and a two-hour commute to Dublin. For the same amount, you can rent a €1,000,000 house in southeast Dublin, close to the Dart line and surrounded by good schools. Once people put off buying in favour of renting, prices will not stabilise, they will crash.”

But then he goes on to say that, “Just as rising prices generate self-fulfilling expectations - you have to buy now before prices rise further, causing prices to rise - so falling prices generate their own momentum.”

Do Professor Kelly and his doom-laden cohorts ever stop to think that they themselves are perpetrating a “self-fulfilling expectation” that prices will fall?

Naturally enough, estate agents CBRE take the other side of the argument, labelling George Lee and Richard Curran as “doom merchants” and pointing out that while investor demand is “easing”, houses are still selling.

“A house price crash is not imminent - just because it happened elsewhere does not mean it will happen here,” says Marie Hunt of CBRE.

Of course, there is no legislating for people who have unrealistic expectations. A lot of houses out there are not selling because the sellers are expecting the same prices that people were prepared to pay in the property madness of two years ago. But that’s another story altogether.

So do we need an arm of the State to be talking down the property market in what is still the most vibrant economy in Europe? Make up your own mind, but most people who have invested their lives in a “ticky-tacky little box” are depending on the feel-good factor to keep a little joy in their hearts.

  • Liam Collins
2

Nobody gives a fuck sid

3

+1

4

Fuck off Pukey

5

sid I would have had you down as a definite alright sort but what’s the story with your delight in the country you live in going down the toilet? Do you not understand that this situation is going to affect you and loads of people you know in a very real way?
Now maybe you are grand and have a safe well paying job but still and all lad it’s fairly bad form…

6

Bit harsh on Sidney there.
Any thread which points out the idiocy and ignorance of Indo journalists is ok by me.

7

I think this thread has potential. I need to go and win 3 points for my astro football club right now but I hope to contribute later.

Gola, I’m disappointed with your opinions on here for the last 24 hours or so.

8

probably posted this in the wrong thread. nobody hates the type of cunt who wrote that artice more than me. I was more talking about the seeming glee sid has shown on the other IMF thread. There’s egg on the faces of people he hates but it’s going to hurt people he knows far more.
Stop trying to bully me Rocko.

9

We need these expert scaremongers

The best is yet to come as the Irish economy moves tentatively but prosperously into the future – if we can abandon our age-old bad habits, says Marc Coleman

Sunday September 23 2007

TWO weeks ago, leading economist Austin Hughes said it. Last Monday, the Taoiseach said it and last Tuesday, Brendan Keenan said it: careless talk costs jobs, and David McWilliams and Richard Curran are careless talkers. The queues that formed outside Northern Rock’s office this week have – as Brendan Keenan pointed out – nothing to do with fundamentals. Northern Rock rode out the recent money market storm. But when its depositors – worried by a spate of apocalyptic media comment – turned into headless chickens, it faced something no firm or economy, however strong, can combat: a loss of confidence.

Now, world financial markets are reeling and the housing market is shaken, both here and in the US. Last Monday’s Generation Game programme is something the economy needed like a hole in the head. Likewise, the Future Shock programme of a few months ago. Exactly how many people are going to lose their jobs and how much housing equity will be lost as a result of those programmes isn’t yet clear. But it will be more, much more, than the fundamental economic situation justifies. Like the Northern Rock situation, the damage will far exceed what was needed.

[b]But let’s get one thing clear: David McWilliams can’t be blamed. In plugging his book and making his simplifications and generalisations, he is – like Richard Curran before him – only giving RTE what it wants. The question is why does RTE want to run down our economy? It is precisely in order to protect it from the pressures of commercialism and sensationalism that RTE receives a licence fee. It also has the privilege – unique amongst national broadcasters – of being allowed to generate advertising revenues. With these privileges comes a responsibility to produce factual, level-headed and accurate analysis. Its latest spate of economic horror movies are exactly the opposite, and their timing couldn’t be worse for the economy and the jobs that depend on them.

Far from an economic storm – or a property shock – Ireland’s economy is set to rock and roll into the century. Ireland is not, as David suggests in his latest book The Generation Game, like Uruguay. Our Latino-like passion for property aside, Ireland and Uruguay couldn’t be more different. Uruguay is isolated in a corrupt and politically chaotic continent. Where ours is imperfect, its public institutions are dysfunctional and its educational system far behind ours.[/b]

Its high-tech multinational sector is not a patch on ours. With Euro membership in one hand, serious US multinational firepower on the other and growing relations with India and China in between, Ireland enters the 21st Century in a position of awesome power. If I believe the Celtic Tiger isn’t over, it’s because I believe it never really happened in the first place. Far from undergoing a 15-year economic boom, Ireland is undergoing a far deeper, more profound, process. A process that – if we manage it right – promises a future more flourishing than ever before; a future that will turn economic prosperity from a statistical fact to a reality.

Alone amongst the countries of the world, Ireland’s population is 50 per cent lower now than in 1841 when 8.1 million lived on the island and 6.5 million lived in what is now the Republic. Although 1.5 million people died in the famine Ireland’s population should have rebounded as did those of famine-stricken countries at the time like Finland. But for 100 years, Ireland was gripped in over a century of policy permafrost. British government malevolence in the 19th Century, followed by 20th Century Irish Government incompetence gave Ireland the worst economic governance outside of Stalin’s Russia. As Europe’s population trebled between 1850 and 2000, ours was cut in half.

Then in 1957 TK Whitaker and Sean Lemass finally broke the spell. Protectionism was abandoned and Ireland’s economic clock started to tick.

Finally – 110 years after it actually happened – we started to recover from the famine. But although we’d opened our economy, we started to go backwards in the Seventies as state spending and taxation rose. Like a bubble in a carpet, policy incompetence had been flattened in one area, external trade, only to pop up in the management of the state’s finances.

In 1987, good fiscal management was added to economic openness. We have never looked back and we have never had it so good. And there is a reason why this should continue well into the 21st Century. Outside of the far north of Europe, ours is the lowest population density country in Europe.

With globalization, hundreds of millions of people are on the move, looking for a country like Ireland to make their home. Land rich but people poor, Ireland is hurtling through history on a journey back to the future. Last year, the population of the state reached 4.2 million people, a number last recorded in 1861. There is a good chance that by 2041 – exactly 200 years after the first Irish census, which recorded our peak level of population – we will restore what our history took away. Far from collapsing, our economy and property prices will do more than hold up.

Provided we get our policy mix right, that is.

Yes, we are going back to the future. But what kind of future is it? How can Ireland grow its population when the 4.2 million here are suffering outlandish property prices and growing congestion? Sadly, underpopulation is not the only legacy of the famine. An obsession with land by our people and a dysfunctional approach to its management by our Government is blocking our progress. We are building a diverse and high technology economy in the 21st Century. But we are designing cities that look more like collections of small villages. We are building out and down when we should be building in and up. Rip-off house prices, long commutes and a declining quality of life are just some of the consequences of this. There are many others.

The water crisis in Galway is another. Poisoned by tens of thousands of one-off housing, it is yet another legacy of a stunted past. Farms, sub-divided in the 1840s in a desperate attempt to survive hunger, are now the foundations on which we build population growth. Instead of clustering efficient close knit communities, we are sprinkling our people all over the countryside. We are building a country in which public services – everything from public transport, sewerage, water supply, healthcare and education – are impossible to deliver efficiently. And despite a level of car ownership that is low by EU standards, the resultant long commutes have turned us into one of Europe’s most oil dependent nations. With the price of oil exceeding $81 a barrel for the first time last week, this is not a place we want to be.

In its current form, the spatial strategy should be torn up and redesigned, this time properly. The Leinsterisation of Ireland – from one third in 1841, Leinster now houses over one half of our population – is not just bad for the economy. It is leading to the surreptitious anglicisation of the nation, the destruction of our uniquely Irish way of life. Our eastern cities contain vibrant multinational communities. But the most precious part of our cultural heartland, the Gaeltacht, is dying because of a failure to protect it, but also a failure to organise Irish-speaking communities into proper, economically viable, towns and villages.

Yes our future is golden. But the ghost of Bull McCabe still haunts the nation and holds the economy back. As Dublin Corporation tightens regulations on apartment-building to accommodate family living, we are finally making a start. Putting young people in our city centres, instead of casting them out to the country, is the way we have to go. Instead of spreading our population all over the country like butter, we have to cluster it efficiently. That way we will be building clustered communities, where the cost of providing public services is lower and economies of scale kick in. A root and branch approach to land reform; how we price it, how we plan it and how we build on it is the only way forward. To release the full potential of the economy, we have to capture the critical mass that comes from higher population density.

We have to reap the density dividend.

To do that, we have to confront the full legacy of the past, not just land.

Our electoral system has made successive governments the slaves of sectional interests. It must be reformed. Our mish-mash of a 100 governments – national, regional and local authorities – needs be be consolidated and directed by a strong, decisive and centralised government. Over 1,000 years after it was done first by Brian Boru, Ireland must have the benefits of a truly independent, truly strong and truly decisive government. One capable of governing for the long term and in the national – rather than the tribal – interest.

If we can do that, anything is possible. Most exciting of all, we can bind the North and South together into a form of unity that threatens no one and, unseen since the 1840s, a flourishing, united all-island economy.

That, for what it’s worth, is my vision of Ireland’s future. The obstacles to reaching it can – with optimism and confidence – be overcome.

We have a difficult couple of years ahead of us. But unless we talk ourselves into one, an economic storm is not going to happen.

If we keep our eyes fixed forward and our heads cool, then the best is yet to come.

Marc Coleman is Economics Editor of Newstalk 106. His new book ‘The Best is Yet To Come’ will be published by Blackhall Publishing.

Did anyone buy that book :lol:

10

Regulation is ‘strangling the wealth creating flair of business’ says banker

By Cyril Hardiman

Friday June 22 2007

THE increasing burden of regulation and compliance is threatening to stymie the entrepreneurial drive and flair which have made this economy the envy of the world, a top banker warned yesterday.

“What concerns me greatly is that just at the time when our economic fortunes are on the wane, those who influence the environment within which we trade seem determined to exert much stricter control on us,” claimed Sean FitzPatrick, chairman and former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank.

“This move to a more heavily regulated economy needs to be challenged vigorously and challenged now,” he argued at a business lunch organised by Experian and held in Dublin yesterday. But Mr FitzPatrick conceded that business’ calls in this regard were not being helped by the behaviour of banking.

He cited “systematic overcharging of customers, the facilitation of tax evasion”, among other misdemeanours, as having contributed to the erosion of trust “to such an extent that it barely exists any more”.

“The banks seem to be doing nothing to try to win back this trust,” he added.

In terms of the regulatory climate, he even suggested that things may have gone too far.

“Have we reached a situation where the weight of compliance with the various financial reporting standards and other corporate regulations is now so heavy that entrepreneurs are no longer willing to bear it?”

Mr FitzPatrick attributed the economic turnaround on the “profound cultural shift” in how we did our business and the “pro-business environment” fostered by Government, including the reduction in taxation.

But having developed this marvellous entrepreneurial culture, which is delivering so many benefits in terms of employment and wealth to the country, Mr FitzPatrick warned of the danger that our regulatory environment has gone too far?

“Are we starting to shackle instead of encouraging the entrepreneurs who in turn generate more wealth not just for themselves, but for the country as a whole.”

He stressed he was not arguing for total deregulation of business. “Business success is firmly grounded in confidence, and this can only be created by an environment of adequate regulation,” he stressed.

"Among the more insidious aspects of the current regulatory environment is its apparent presumption of guilt on the part of entrepreneurs and business people generally.

“The whole structure seems to be geared towards something akin to an annual proof of innocence statement. This is corporate ‘McCarthyism’ and we shouldn’t tolerate it,” he said.

  • Cyril Hardiman
11

Marc Coleman is a dangerous sort of cunt.

12

The lack of bullet point implementation is ruining this forum

13

Nostradamus predicted it all.

14

Some tremendous stuff here, Marc Coleman’s introduction to this thread has been a revelation. Where are these cunts now?

15

Those last two bits were loltastic. You could collect up this shit into a book format, get Matt Cooper to write a foreword and make a fortune on the Xmas market.

16

Marc had this on the BBC site just yesterday

iewpoint: Ireland’s robust economy knocked off course
By Marc Coleman Irish economics commentator

Watching the ongoing coverage of Ireland’s bail-out crisis, I now know how Vanderlei de Lima must have felt.

You don’t remember Vanderlei de Lima?

His is a story that captures the Irish Republic’s current situation as well as any other. And there is an Irishman involved too.

The place was Athens, 29 August 2004, and the Brazilian de Lima was leading the field in the Olympic marathon.

After a gruelling 35km (22 miles), de Lima had just 5km left to run with an excellent chance of winning when, bizarrely and out of nowhere, an eccentric and defrocked priest by the name of Father Niall Horan ran out from the crowds and pushed de Lima into the spectators.

The event gained notoriety around the world and Horan emerged as a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent last year.

De Lima recovered and went on to finish the marathon, coming third instead of first.

For the Irish economy, the past two years have been a combination of a marathon and a gruelling assault course.

Getting to grips

Of course, the government has made mistakes.

But, compared with other governments, most notably Gordon Brown’s Labour government, Ireland started getting to grips with its budgetary crisis early, implementing two emergency budgets in October 2008 and April 2009, followed by a budget last December in which public pay was cut.

By a magnitude of 5% of GDP, Ireland has achieved more correction in its budget, in relative terms, than most EU countries put together.

Our debt level is, when you account for a pensions reserve fund, actually still lower than Britain’s and this despite a decade of massive infrastructure investment.

Sadly, speculation - justified but overdone - that Ireland’s bank bail-out costs would escalate beyond the state’s ability to meet them has knocked us off balance.

Badly affected by a property bubble that burst, the estimated cost has been regarded by bond markets as a sign of the state of our economy and a burden that the government cannot bear.

It is no such thing.

Sure, the bail-out is a drag on our fiscal future. But its current estimate - which reports say has been borne out by scrutiny from EU and ECB officials - is around 35bn euros (£30bn; $47bn).

If spread over 10 years - and even if this rises - the annual cost is at or below half of what we spent each year on infrastructure investment.

Painful yes. Fatal no.

Healthy surpluses

As for the current state of the economy - the majority not constituted by the property market - exports rose by 7.8% in August, manufacturing output was up 12% in September, unemployment fell for the second month in a row in October and tax revenues overshot expectations in the same month.

And, unlike Greece, Portugal and Spain, Ireland is heading for healthy balance of payments surpluses in coming years.

And did I mention that US investment in Ireland exceeds US investment in Brazil, Russia, India and China put together?

Unfortunately the Irish government has, as George W Bush might say, “misunderestimated” the early extent of bank losses, allowing doubt to emerge about its full extent.

Nor has the German government helped a whole bunch by appearing to threaten holders of sovereign bonds with “haircuts” [asset value reductions], another Bush-style miscommunication only clarified after last Friday’s G20 summit.

Donkeys

Not that the media have been a great help either.

Images of people riding on donkeys or begging, together with one-sided dramatised narratives about young people leaving the country (our population has continued to grow well into the recession) may boost viewership, listenership and readership figures.

But they convey an image of Ireland totally at odds with the reality of a country that last week was voted by the UN human development index as the world’s 5th most desirable place to live.

The UK was - sorry to point this out - 26th. Our GDP per capita remains 30% above the EU average and well above Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

And, unlike France, we are a country where - without riots - we can create agreement between our political parties on the need to get our house in order.

Where do we go from here?

While government and media have played a role, Ireland’s current crisis is fundamentally made up of two interacting components - a fiscal crisis and a banking crisis.

We were three weeks away from solving the former by ourselves when doubts about the latter - the proverbial “Father Niall Horan” in this story - hit us for six.

Humiliating

Resorting to a bail-out in relation to our banking crisis might look like a smart move: big sister Angela facing down banks that her little Irish brother is too weak to.

But the damage to Ireland’s reputation and the euro would be humbling, at the very least.

An excessive bail-out - one targeted at both our public debt crisis and banking crisis - could be more than humbling.

For a nation that had run so long and so hard to win this race, it would be humiliating.

A year ago, such an event would not have brought Ireland closer to the UK: then-Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy’s reference to Ireland as part of an “arc of insolvency” had created too much bad blood.

David Cameron’s government is a different affair.

Ireland will never leave the euro (at least as long as it exists).

But this week’s events could result in Ireland taking a more cautious view of Europe, and a more positive view of Britain, in the future.

Marc Coleman is Economics Editor at Newstalk 106-108FM and Economics columnist with The Sunday Independent

17

They’re still at it shannonsider. I posted an article here somewhere from the FT, written at the end of September by the chief of IBEC. The gist of the article was that Ireland was going to bounce back and recover from the banking crisis in no time. The are still spreading the same lies because ultimately, they (or their paymasters) want to keep the same tax and political framework that created this mess. That it has wrecked the country in an unfortunate externality, but it shouldn’t be allowed to change anything.

And they’re getting paid to write this bollocks because they know it’s a live runner, it is entirely possible that the consequences of this crisis still accrue to the benefit of the political and business elite. First they blamed the ‘doom merchants’, then those dastardly public sector workers, now their ire is turning to ze germans and those evil eurocrats who are out to destroy. Sure wouldn’t we still be a great little country if Seanie Fitz and Bertie were allowed to sort it out and if the rest of us took a little bit of hardship like abolishing the health service.

18

The smart, ballsy guys are buying up property right now

By Brendan O’Connor

Sunday July 29 2007

SO THE sky is falling in again. The Irish stock market is apparently in meltdown, because of the housing market, which is also apparently in meltdown. The level of property horror stories is at an all-time high and everyone is tripping over each other to predict even greater gloom than the next guy.

Tell you what, I think I know what I’d be doing if I had money, and if I wasn’t already massively over-exposed to the property market by virtue of owning a reasonable home. I’d be buying property. In fact, I might do it anyway. You don’t even need money to buy property these days. Imagine if you walked into the bank and said, “Listen, guys. I want to gamble a million on the stock market. I have 100 grand myself, will you guys lend me 900 grand at really low rates and I’ll pay you back over 40 years? In fact I won’t even pay off the principal, I’ll just pay off the interest.” They’d laugh you out of it. But substitute gambling on the property market for gambling on the stock market and they’ll fall over themselves to give it to you.

So why would I be buying property right now if I could? Well, for starters, property is good value these days. It’s certainly cheaper than it was six months ago. While the official figures on aggregate surveys are talking about drops of two to three per cent in property prices, anyone who is out there in the jungle will tell you that it is a buyer’s market bigtime.

If you’re smart and you have balls and you’re dealing with the right buyer you can knock 10 per cent or more off the price of a house these days. And that could well be a house that has already been reduced in price by 10 per cent or more in the last six months. Because while the big picture suggests a 3 per cent drop, the big picture is made up of lots of little pictures and you don’t knock 3 per cent off the price of your house if you can’t sell it. Individual house prices fall in substantial chunks.

John D Rockefeller famously said that the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets. Buying into a boom is kind of a mug’s game, and, as we know, anyone can do it. The really smart and ballsy guys are the guys who are buying when no one else is. The guys who made real money on property in Ireland were the ones who bought property before everyone else, when it was unfashionable. They were in a minority. Most people who bought property bought it recently, in a seller’s market, for top dollar. Which makes no sense when you think about it. When you think about it, it makes sense to buy property now. Though of course some people say it always makes sense to buy property. There is no such thing as a good or a bad time to buy. It’s always a good time to buy.

Anyway, there is blood on the streets, or at least an impression of blood on the streets, and it’s time to buy. You can be guaranteed that’s what the smart guys are doing. Every smart, rich bloke (the two can, in fact, occur in the same guy) I’ve spoken to for the last few years has been, to some extent, hoarding cash, waiting for this. And now they’re around picking up bargains. Some of them might be waiting a little while more, in the hope that we haven’t reached the bottom yet. But lots of them know that the trick is to buy and sell stuff a little bit too soon. Lots of guys have gone broke waiting for the actual top or bottom of the market.

Not only is property better value now than when everyone was barrelling into it a year ago, it also provides better returns. Rents are booming right now. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it: right now you can buy property for less and it will yield you more. That’s a better deal than six months ago.

Money is also still cheap. OK, interest rates aren’t 2 per cent any more, but 5 per cent is still cheap money in anyone’s books and everyone seems to agree it’s not going to get much dearer.

This is not to say everything is rosy in the garden, but then you know that. The vultures of doom who have been circling for years waiting to be right eventually are having a field day.

It was another week of gloom and doom in the headlines.

After years of willing it, journalists who didn’t buy property when they should have think they’ve finally got what they wanted. And they are wallowing in the mire. They also know that bad news is good news and a headline that’s going to scare the crap out of people is more fun than one that just says things are still OK.

But reading between the headlines, a more balanced picture emerges.

For example, Jim Power of Friends First was credited with giving a gloomy outlook for the economy and housing last week. In fact, Power was relatively upbeat about property. Is a 2 per cent drop in the market overall really going to kill us? Is that not a soft landing? And did Power not predict that prices would start to rise again next year due to less supply, more mortgage-interest relief and stabilising interest rates? If that’s what we regard as gloom these days, then clearly we’re spoilt.

The Central Bank’s version of gloom last week was to say that growth will fall this year - to 5 per cent. As falling growth goes, 5 per cent ain’t bad.

Unemployment is going to grow too - from 4.5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. It’s hardly the bad old days, is it? Four or 5 per cent unemployment constitutes practically full employment when you take into account frictional, structural and voluntary unemployment - the unemployment that always exists even if there are jobs for everyone.

And, yes, the Iseq is down 6 per cent this year, but balance that off against the 30 per cent it gained last year. The 6 per cent fall doesn’t even fully cancel out its gains of last December.

So, you know, maybe the sky is falling in, but maybe you should think twice before you follow the Chicken Lickens of the media into Foxy Loxy’s dark cave.

  • Brendan O’Connor
19

Hopefully he feels a little foolish now but I doubt it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkh_UviAyI
eature=player_embedded#