Thursday, Sep 2nd 2010
CIRCULATION FIGURES:
Jan - June 2010
Irish Independent 144896
Irish Examiner 46687
The Irish Times 105742
Irish Daily Star 93729
Irish Daily Mirror 60460
The Irish Sun 86064
Irish Daily Mail 51338
Weekend Herald 40933
Excellent blog post from Aiden Lloyd, on EAPN’s On the Line blog. This pretty much nails the governments ‘thinking’ behind the workfare scheme. It wants to be seen to be doing something, while doing absolutely nothing. The economic structure of the country is based on attracting foreign capital, aka laundering profits, which only really benefits a small minority. Everything else is supposed to ‘trickle down’ from this. They’re not interested in restructuring the economy to boost indiginous growth.
Minister O’Cuiv aims to use these schemes to provide unemployed people with short-term work activity, to up-skill them and ‘get them back into the mainstream workforce as speedily as possible’. He further contends that ‘maintaining people’s employability through regular work activity will be important for getting people back into the competitive economy’. This stance is revealing and is indicative of government thinking in terms of job creation for unemployed people. It would appear that the decision has already been made that any recovery will be dependent on a general improvement in the global economy and that the immediate priority is to manage matters until this recovery comes about.
Hugh Green, on foot of the largest profit loss in Irish history - the 8.2 bn lost by Anglo Irish Bank in six months - has started to look at the figures and its eye watering.
Grants to Enterprise was ticking over nicely all the way through the boom, making up 5-7% of capital expenditure. Then bam! 2009 we’re up to nearly 25% of capital expenditure. Only problem is that in 2009, it’s mostly down to Anglo Irish Bank.
And
But seeing as we’re heading into the propaganda season leading up to the budget, talking about the ‘savings’ that will have to be made, what with the ‘fiscal austerity’ being demanded by the ‘markets’, in the form of cuts to welfare, education and health, consider austerity in relation to spending on Anglo Irish Bank.
See chart for details.
This comment from an anonymous punter on progressive economy sums up many of my thoughts on the matter
"The thing that annoys me most about this is that it's not a real proposal. The Department can't provide any detailed proposals because there aren't any!
The Minister appears to have thrown a (bad) idea out there to convey the impression that something's being done to tackle our unemployment problem when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
He's accused unemployed people of widespread fraud, without offering them any hope of getting a real job.
We've seen the biggest recorded job losses in the history of the state, and Minister O'Cuiv thinks the numbers are high because people are refusing jobs, or working and claiming - what jobs does he think are out there? Employers are complaining because they're inundated with applications for any job advertised, not because no-one's applying!
There is however, a deep issue at stake if defence of decent European social standards is to be placed at the heart of policy making and not to become an increasingly powerless lobby at the margins of the debate. For that to happen the European Union must surely break with an almost exclusive emphasis on GDP as the be all and end all of economic policy objectives. The time has come to replace GDP with a far wider, more socially and environmentally responsible measure of economic progress.
In the late boom year of 2005 the Gross Value Added (GVA) of the building and construction sector was €12.9bn and industry ex bulding was €33.6bn (2009 National incomes and Accounts, Table 4). By contrast the GVA of 'Other services', which includes financial services was €67.6bn.
If we turn to the separate Input-Output tables, the 3 categories of financial services (finance, insurance and related) comprised €32bn.
These are very large numbers and they are based on a fiction.
The CSO link provided by Michael Taft shows Ireland has a trade deficit in services with the US of some €17.4bn, whereas services trade with the Europe and the rest of the world is in surplus.
Good post on the BBC's official response to criticism of their Panorama documentary on the Gaza flotilla
The BBC has, predictably, “dismiss[ed]” claims that a recent Panorama documentary on the Gaza flotilla was biased towards Israel. But its response itself illustrates the crux of the problem:
“Israel has been accused of breaking international law by seizing a Turkish ship. Israel says they were terrorists. Turkey insists they were innocent victims.”
That same opposition was proposed throughout the documentary on the flotilla: were the activists terrorists, or were they innocent peace activists?
The Double Irish’
On advice from Ernst & Young, Forest Laboratories Ireland reorganized that year, dropping the country from its name. The newly dubbed Forest Laboratories Holdings Ltd. established a registered office in Hamilton, Bermuda, declaring the island its tax residence. This unit took control of licensing the patents.
A second subsidiary in Ireland inherited the old name. It handled the manufacturing, sublicensing the rights to the patents, according to a corporate disclosure and an internal Forest flow chart tracing the arrangement that was reviewed by Bloomberg.
The change helped the Irish subsidiary cut its effective tax rate to 2.4 percent from 10.3 percent the year before the reorganization, according to its annual reports. It did so by deducting from its taxable income the fees that went to Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax. Charlie Perkins, a spokesman for Ernst & Young, one of the so-called Big Four, declined to comment on its work for Forest.
And yet it’s not clear that the worst is over. The banks haven’t yet made a big move on distressed home mortgages and no one is clear what will happen when forebearance is no longer a viable strategy. Notwithstanding the government’s attempts to compare tax revenue to “profile” (i.e. a very recent projection), the fact is that tax revenue is stagnant at last year’s depression-like levels despite an apparent recovery in economic statistics. And while there are those desperate hotels, the tourists will still find fussy and expensive restaurants (plus VAT).
Are there any tricks left in the bag? The government is looking at privatization, most likely as a way to realize a large amount of cash at fairly short notice — essentially a portfolio switch of state-owned companies for all the bank liabilities it has taken on. And there are some bizarre Thatcherite echoes in the possible appearance of a poll tax by the end of the year (dressed up as a “flat rate” water charge or property tax)
As a percentage of GDP the Euro-area average is 25.4%, the EU 27 is 31.2%. This is about 1,870 billion for the entire Eurozone. Nothing compared to what has been allocated to the Greek government. But, get this, Ireland spent a whopping 231.8% of its GDP, massively above any other country. Most of this is accounted for by the blanket guarantee of bank liabilities.
