Southofdub

Mariners Point

2012-01-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

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A church, a Pub, and 2 Ghosts

2011-12-30T22:43:00.000-08:00

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Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T00:02:00.001-08:00

Bringing Down the House

2011-12-11T20:27:00.001-08:00

Lucinda Researched This

2011-11-26T11:11:00.001-08:00

Arbeit Macht Frei

IT IS not unusual, at times of economic crisis, that nations retreat inwards. They see others as rivals – sources of strife and aggression. They jealously guard their own patch, while the instinct of citizens and politicians is to batten down the hatches and become more inward looking, seeing solutions to all problems as being internal rather than external.

The trend towards narrow nationalism in Europe is worrying. Irish people speaking ill of the Germans, Germans speaking ill of the Greeks and so on. This vicious cycle needs to be tackled.

Lucinda Researched This

Wall Street Wankers

2011-11-23T15:54:00.001-08:00

Treaty of debt

2011-10-30T10:51:00.001-07:00

Ghost's

2011-07-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

Fiscal Advisory Council

2011-07-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

THE MINISTER of Finance Michael Noonan has announced the make-up of the Fiscal Advisory Council, the independent watchdog tasked with overseeing the management of public finances.
Prof John McHale of the NUI Galway will chair the new entity. He will not be paid a salary for taking on the role.
The four other members of the council are Sebastian Barnes of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and a former analyst of the Irish economy for that body; Prof Alan(there will be no crash) Barrett of Trinity College Dublin and a former ESRI economic forecaster; former IMF deputy director Dr Donal Donovan of University of Limerick; and Róisín O’Sullivan, associate professor of economics at Smith College, Massachusetts, who previously worked as an economist at the Central Bank.

Irish Times

Matt Taibbi & Nomi Prins on the financial crisis

2011-06-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

Walk Away

2011-06-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ireland is not Greece

2011-05-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

DSK

2011-05-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

The People vs Goldman Sachs

2011-05-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

Inside Job

2011-05-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

Let the good times roll

2011-04-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

Obama's Ghost Estate

2011-04-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

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Hotspots

2011-04-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Price Stability

2011-04-18T19:33:00.001-07:00

From Quant to Want

2011-04-17T21:10:00.000-07:00

On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That's when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology. He became, as it were, a Want.

This Tech Bubble Is Different

securitization

2011-04-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

The Shoe Box

2011-04-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

The Developer

2011-04-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

Rathdrum

2011-03-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Bertie's Ghost's

2011-03-05T01:40:00.000-08:00

Pause the tour on an Image to Un-Blur and move around

Why aren't Bankesters in Jail

2011-02-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Vinnie and Willie

2011-02-25T21:11:00.000-08:00

The DAA

2011-02-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

DAA Pride Barry Murphy Parody from Ciaran McCarthy on Vimeo.

The Anarchist Party

2011-02-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Another Prick in The Dail

2011-02-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

Let Them Eat Cheese

2011-02-13T06:54:00.001-08:00

Vinnie and Joan

2011-02-11T09:42:00.001-08:00

Jump off the sinking Ship

2011-02-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Bubble Phone

2011-02-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

When Irish Eyes are Crying

2011-02-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

Kelly’s colleagues in the University College economics department watched his transformation from serious academic to amusing crackpot to disturbingly prescient guru with interest. One was Colm McCarthy, who, in the Irish recession of the late 1980s, had played a high-profile role in slashing government spending, and so had experienced the intersection of finance and public opinion. In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

Vanity Fair

The Clown's downfall

2011-01-29T23:44:00.000-08:00

The Flaw

2011-01-28T23:56:00.000-08:00

Have You No Shame

2011-01-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Clown Quits

2011-01-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

Corrupt Kleptocracy

2011-01-22T00:43:00.000-08:00

A Day is a long time in Irish Politic's

2011-01-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Why hasn't Sean Fitzpatrick been Executed

2011-01-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

The American Dream

2011-01-04T20:29:00.000-08:00

More Anglo Crap

2011-01-02T00:04:00.001-08:00

The Latest NAMA Plan

2010-12-28T23:55:00.000-08:00

Ireland's state-owned "bad bank" NAMA has announced an unconventional plan to recover assets from real estate developer's wives using a team of crack gigolos.

At a hastily arranged press conference this evening NAMA chairman Mr Frank Daly said, "We have hired over one hundred mostly Italian guys to seduce these ladies."

Mr Daly was speaking in the wake of revelations on Irish television's Prime Time program that many Irish developers transferred property and other assets to their wives to avoid their debt obligations. This was done with intent of preventing the Irish taxpayer from recovering the assets, which include mansions, land and apartment complexes. The assets may now be legally out of reach.

"Don't worry, we'll get a lot of these assets back. Most of these developers are wrinkly old geezers," continued Mr Daly, "What's more, now they are broke. As soon as Giovanni comes a-calling, Mrs Developer is out of there. I guarantee it."

Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said: "NAMA's gigolos are the best in the world. Within a 12 month period they will seduce, romance, marry and then divorce these developer's wives, thereby recovering at least half the assets for the Irish taxpayer."

Sources in the Department of Finance said that they have contracted with the gigolos to pay them a percentage of the assets ultimately recovered.

Huffington Post

Christmas Comes But Once a Year

2010-12-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

Day of Reckoning

2010-12-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

Unintended Conseqences

2010-12-20T20:52:00.000-08:00

Time

2010-12-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

Rubber Bandit's

2010-12-15T09:42:00.000-08:00

Banker's Wa***r's

2010-12-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

Irish Banking Fail

2010-12-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

Hitler saves Ireland

2010-12-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

Ireland forced to take EU bailout

2010-12-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

Take the money and buy Gold

2010-12-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

If Ireland wants to get creative, it should take Trichet up on the offer right now for "unlimited cash" at 1%, and put the whole shebang on gold.
In a few of months when the payment is due, Ireland can tell the ECB that it will keep the gold to start a new gold-backed currency and the ECB can keep the IOUs. That would get the ECB and IMF talking about haircuts in short order.

Mish

Bail out My Arse

2010-11-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

Dr Doom

2010-11-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Keiser Report №92: Fake Markets! Fake Finance!

2010-11-06T01:19:00.000-07:00

Wicklow's Ghost Estates

2010-10-30T03:26:00.000-07:00

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Irish Banking Fraud

2010-10-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

Wexford Ghost Estates

2010-10-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

An Toilean

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Elderwood

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Uncle Ben Goes Shopping

2010-10-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Uncle Ben goes shopping from Marketplace on Vimeo.

RoboStop

2010-10-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

HOW did foreclosures go, in a matter of weeks, from just another miserable statistic in America’s housing bust to the subject of a scandal with its own “-gate” suffix? The answer is a combination of sloppy (and possibly fraudulent) paperwork, a securitisation process that is even more broken than anyone imagined and a febrile political environment.

“Foreclosuregate” flared up when an employee at GMAC Mortgage, part of Ally Financial, admitted to having approved thousands of repossessions without properly reviewing the documents. The company responded by halting sales of seized homes in the 23 states where court approval is required to foreclose while it gets to the bottom of its “robo-signing” problem. JPMorgan Chase and several other servicers (which manage loans and distribute payments to investors in mortgage-backed securities) quickly followed suit. Bank of America has called a stop in all 50 states.

RoboStop

Bananna Republic - BaNAMA Republic

2010-10-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

High Frequency Trading

2010-10-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Where it all began

2010-10-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

One of Anglo's Black Holes

2010-10-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

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The Vampire Squid

2010-10-10T09:35:00.000-07:00

AUSTERITY

2010-10-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

WatsonMedia presents Mark Blyth on Austerity from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.

Fun with Google maps

2010-10-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

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Rathdrum Co Wicklow Apartments. Who in their right mind would buy an apartment in Rathdrum ??

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Wicklow town Ghost Estates.

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Courtown Harbour Apartments!!!

Trucker Joe

2010-09-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Calling a spade a spade

2010-09-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

Let's look at the reality. What I want to focus on here is the issue of re-mortgaging, equity release and the deluge of cash borrowed against houses, which made us feel richer but which was ultimately wasted. This is the reality and this is why we will default, because the money is gone. The internal default is what drives the external default, not the other way around. The ability of the Government to pay its debts is only the amalgamated ability of us to pay our debts. The "Irish sovereign", as it is so grandly termed, is only the agglomeration of us.

The amount of outstanding mortgage debt at the start of January 2004 was €54.6bn. It is now €118bn. So mortgage lending went up by close to 120pc in five years.

It could be argued that there are many more houses in Ireland since the beginning of 2004, so maybe those numbers are not as bad as they seem -- because at least we have houses on the other side of the balance sheet.

But this is not the case, because on the other side of the balance sheet are cars, second houses, fields, fancy kitchens, flat-screen TVs and holidays on the Algarve. This is what we borrowed for and we used our houses as a large ATM machine, and the banks eagerly facilitated.

At the beginning of 2004, 16pc of our housing stock (by value) was mortgaged; by mid-2010 that number stood at 39pc.

It is important to remember the majority of houses in the State are not mortgaged, or have very small mortgages on them. So a huge amount of the mortgage debt and the re-mortgaging is centred on a certain part of the population, which is likely to be young couples -- the backbone of the society and the generation supposed to drag us out of the pit.

Their plight is now evident. Recent Central Bank data shows that of the €118bn in mortgages outstanding, €6.95bn are more than 90 days in arrears, with €4.8bn of those more than six months behind.

For these people in arrears (there are 36,620 of them) there is no way out, as property price falls mean that they cannot sell their property to relieve their debts (negative equity) and they cannot earn more money to pay off their debts (due to the economic collapse). Essentially, when these people most need money, they can't get it.

So the financial markets are looking at the internal situation and concluding that -- unlike the Greeks who had a government borrowing problem that became a banking crisis -- we have a bank borrowing problem which has become a government problem. If the guarantee was lifted today, a huge part of the State's burden would be lifted.

But that would mean defining reality and our leaders couldn't do that.

The Indo

CLOWN

2010-09-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

GTDE

2010-09-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

BRUSSELS—Two months after Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008, a small group of European leaders set up a secret task force—one so secret that they dubbed it "the group that doesn't exist."
Its mission: Devise a plan to head off a default by a country in the 16-nation euro zone.
When Greece ran into trouble a year later, the conclave, whose existence has never before been reported, had yet to agree on a strategy. In a prelude to a cantankerous public debate that would later delay Europe's response to the euro-zone debt crisis until the eleventh hour, the task force struggled to surmount broad disagreement over whether and how the euro zone should rescue one of its own. It never found the answer.
A Wall Street Journal investigation, based on dozens of interviews with officials from around the EU, reveals that the divisions that bedeviled the task force pushed the currency union perilously close to collapse. In early May, just hours before Germany and France broke their stalemate and agreed to endorse a trillion-dollar fund to rescue troubled euro-zone members, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told her delegation the euro zone was on the verge of breaking apart, according to people familiar with the matter.
The euro zone's near death had stakes for people around the world. A wave of government defaults on Europe's periphery could have triggered a new crisis in the international banking system, with even worse consequences for the global economy than the failure of Lehman.
The dangerous dithering was driven by ideological divisions that continue to paralyze the currency union's search for solutions to its structural flaws. Deep differences on economic policy between Europe's frugal north and laxer south, between Germany and France, and between national governments and central EU institutions hindered an effective early response to the crisis. Only when faced with calamity—the collapse of the euro zone—did leaders put aside their differences and reach a compromise.
Complicating matters: The two most important politicians deciding the fate of the euro often had conflicting agendas—and much at stake personally.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, known in France as the "hyper-president" for his relentless flurry of new initiatives, faced declining approval ratings as his domestic economic overhaul stalled. The excitable 55-year-old leader saw that Greece's woes could rock the euro zone. Mr. Sarkozy seized on the issue as an opportunity to prove his leadership chops and thus shore up his popularity.
For German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 56, the crisis was the biggest test of her career. A trained physicist known for her cautious, deliberative style, she feared a backlash from German voters and lawmakers, and defeat in Germany's supreme court, if she risked taxpayer money on serial deficit-sinner Greece. Despite pressure from Mr. Sarkozy, she fiercely resisted a quick fix.

Wall street Journal

Irish Poker

2010-09-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Dumb money at the poker table

2010-09-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

The Monkey Economy

2010-09-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

Overdose

2010-09-04T05:47:00.000-07:00

FreeFall

2010-08-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

Two years in. who called it right?

2010-08-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Extend and Pretend

2010-07-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Plunder

2010-07-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Tarnished Miracle

2010-07-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Irish Subprime

2010-07-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

Go to Youtube search for "subprime" sort by "upload date" this shows up at the top of the list.

Froth and stagnation

2010-07-10T20:11:00.001-07:00

In recent months several countries have experimented with measures to cool bubbly property markets. Yet since The Economist’s global round-up of housing markets was last published in April, house-price inflation has accelerated in some of the very countries where the authorities have intervened to slow its rise.
Asia has been at the forefront of such interventions. In February Singapore’s government raised down-payment requirements and imposed stamp duties on all residential properties sold within a year of purchase in a bid to curb speculation. Despite these steps prices in the island nation rose by nearly 40% in the year to the end of the second quarter, after a rise of just over 25% in the year to the end of the first quarter. Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong to become the frothiest housing market among those we monitor.
House prices in Australia rose by 20% in the year to the end of the first quarter, faster than the 13.5% recorded in the 12 months to late 2009. More concerning, however, is our analysis of “fair value” in housing, which is based on comparing the current ratio of house prices to rents with its long-term average. By this measure Australian property is the most overvalued of any of the 20 countries we track. A frothy property market was one of the reasons for the Reserve Bank of Australia raising interest rates six times between October and May. Since then, the bank has become more sanguine about the state of the market. It cited “some signs that the earlier buoyancy in the housing market was easing” when keeping interest rates on hold in June.
China’s property-cooling measures, meanwhile, which were similar to Singapore’s, were announced in April. Our house-price figures for China now extend to the end of May. They help explain why the Chinese government had become more concerned. Year-on-year house-price inflation peaked in April at 12.8%, but has since moderated a bit.

The Economist

The Big Interview

2010-07-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Crises of Capitalism

2010-07-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Financial Reform

2010-07-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Apres Match

2010-06-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

The Liquidator

2010-06-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Watch CBS News Videos Online

The Double Dip

2010-06-18T23:43:00.001-07:00

A white Swan for the butcher, is a black Swan for the turkey.

2010-06-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Plunge Protection Team

2010-06-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Bursting Bubbles

2010-06-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Bursting Bubbles (Subprime Productions, 2008) from TWRW Films on Vimeo.

The Granddaddy of all Bubbles

2010-06-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

Cannonball

2010-06-06T00:24:00.000-07:00

Cannonball from California is a place. on Vimeo.

Debtors Prism

2010-06-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

IT’S a $2.6 trillion mystery.

That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.
And doubt, as it always does during economic crises, has made Europe’s already vulnerable financial system occasionally appear to seize up. Early last month, in an indication of just how The problem is, alas, that no one — not investors, not regulators, not even bankers themselves — knows exactly which banks are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of rotting loans within that pile.dangerous the situation had become, European banks — which appear to hold more than half of that $2.6 trillion in debt — nearly stopped lending money to one another.

Depfa, a German bank that is now based in Dublin, is one of the few second-tier European banking institutions that have offered detailed disclosures about their financial wherewithal, and its stark troubles may be emblematic of those still hidden on other banks’ books.

Despite boasting as recently as two years ago of its “very conservative lending practices,” Depfa, which caters primarily to governments, has flirted with disaster. It narrowly avoided collapsing in late 2008 until the German government bailed it out, and today its books are still laden with risk.

DEPFA and its parent, Hypo Real Estate Holding, a property lender outside Munich, have 80.4 billion euros in public-sector debt from Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy. The amount was first disclosed in March but did not draw much attention outside Germany until last month, when investors decided to finally try to tally how much cross-border lending had gone on in Europe.

New York Times

The Gold Rush

2010-05-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Black Swan -Failed bond auction

2010-05-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

Meltup

2010-05-16T20:30:00.000-07:00