By Cormac Lucey It is 10 years since the Irish government’s fateful decision to guarantee the liabilities of the Irish banks. That rubber-stamped the country’s plunge into financial disaster, following the collapse two weeks earlier of Lehman Brothers, which kickstarted the international financial crisis. As with all meltdowns, there had been plenty of warnings. The share price of Bank of … Read More
Trump may be bluffing on trade, but stakes for Ireland couldn’t be higher
By Cormac Lucey For most of the first year of his rule, Donald Trump’s bark was worse than his bite. Yet, over the past few months, the US president has started to show his pearly whites. He introduced $1.5 trillion of tax cuts — without any balancing spending cuts — at a stage of the recovery cycle when the American … Read More
The EU has picked a strange time to pick on Ireland over corporate tax
By Eamon Delaney With all that is happening at the moment internationally, but especially in Europe, you really have to wonder : why would the EU pick now, of all times, to come after Ireland on corporate tax? At the World Economic Forum at Davos, but also in the European Parliament and elsewhere, Eurocrats and their economic cheerleaders lined up … Read More
Doubling Ireland’s ‘global footprint’ is a rash and expensive move
Eamon Delaney Never mind the actual problems here at home – the housing crisis, with a now added student accommodation crisis, which we should have seen coming. And the ongoing health crisis, with record-breaking trolly numbers, and a Minister finally admitting what we’ve always known : that the health unions are a huge impediment to HSE reform. But no-one in … Read More
Debt, currency and equities – and the EU and US approach
By Cormac Lucey One of the greatest economic challenges of the age is that of deleveraging. Having built up huge levels of deb mountainous debt levels over recent decades, how is the world to gradually reduce them? Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, wrote an article a few years ago titled “An In-Depth Look at Deleveragings” that … Read More
Exciting Hibernia Forum Event on Brexit, Trump and Ireland
The Hibernia Forum held an important and exciting conference on Thursday, 23 February on ‘What Now For Ireland in the Era of Trump and Brexit?’ The conference, with an impressive line up of Irish and international speakers, was held in the offices of Connect Ireland, on 14 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2. Among the speakers were former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, … Read More
Ireland’s apple-licking response to Trump
By Cormac Lucey Many years ago I heard Professor Declan Kiberd describe the Irish as “apple-lickers”. Imagine if the Book of Genesis had featured Paddy and Eve in the Garden of Eden, instead of Adam and Eve. Paddy and Eve would have been free to eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good … Read More
Ireland could suffer when Trump adds fuel to the fire
By Cormac Lucey Recently the S&P 500 — the benchmark measure of shares in the United States — hit an all-time high while the Dow Jones surpassed the 20,000 level. However, this could spell bad news for Ireland. The sooner the world’s economies recover from the global financial crisis, the sooner the European Central Bank’s policy of extraordinarily low interest … Read More
May and Trump will leave us shaken up
By Cormac Lucey The two seismic political developments of the past 12 months were the UK’s June referendum decision to exit the EU and the November vote to make Donald Trump the next US president. Put beside them, our general election pales into insignificance. For Ireland, Brexit may represent a cloud with few silver linings. We are the only EU … Read More
Globalisation – good for Ireland but facing new challenges elsewhere
By Cormac Lucey in the Irish Sunday Times I was born in 1960 and was initially brought up in Belfast, where my father worked as a doctor. Why was he working there when he and my mother came from Co Galway? Simple. Back then pay and conditions were much better north of the border than in the south. In 1970, … Read More
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