The arrival of Matthew Elderfield a.k.a. The Financial Regulator a.k.a. The Regulator a.k.a. The Sheriff of Dodge City has been universally heralded by the media and political establishment as the second coming of Christ. Well, the Christ of ledgers, calculators and informal speeches at the Financial Services Ireland Conference anyway.
At a time when public sector workers and government are almost [...]

On Tuesday, 30 March 2010, Brian Lenihan - Minister for Finance in a state with a €20 billion deficit and almost 450,000 people unemployed - stood before the Dáil and announced that over the next number of years Ireland will pump €80 billion into five wayward banks.
In carefully coordinated statements, [...]

[Speech by Arthur Morgan TD, Sinn Féin's Finance Spokesperson delivered in the Dail yesterday in response to Minister Lenihan's announcement of the recapitalisation details following the beginning of the process to move the loans to NAMA]
You do not have the authority to implement a bank bailout of this scale. Your government is at record lows [...]

[Labour Party Finance Spokesperson Joan Burton's speech to the Dail after Finance Minister Brian Lenihan announced the details of the recapitalisation of Irish banks after loans had been taken into NAMA]
The Irish taxpayer is today seeing the costs and consequences of crony Irish capitalism.
Today’s recapitalisation and transfer of assets to NAMA is socialism for bankers [...]

Writing in the Irish Independent today Brendan Keenan seemed to have an epiphany regarding Ireland’s deflation problem. He, like most Irish newspaper economic commentators considers the deflationary effects of the strategy to reduce spending, including public sector pay and pension provision as unimportant.  In order to achieve this revelation, however, all he had to do [...]

Sixteen months after the Dublin government committed the state to underwriting the six main banks’ total deposits and loans, and half a year since the introduction of the NAMA initiative - the issue of home repossessions has come to the fore. Billions of euro have been invested in the banks, eleven to be exact. Not [...]

When the world financial system looked as if it might collapse in the autumn of 2008, many people assumed that there would have to be drastic changes in the wake of the crisis. Nothing would ever be the same again: the neoliberal philosophy which had spawned the financial meltdown was now irreparably damaged, and a [...]

Yesterday I talked to Michael Burke, an economist with 25 years experience working in the Financial Services sector in the UK, including a 5 years period as a senior economist in Citibank. Recently he entered the economic debate here by saying that the Government’s current strategy of cutting government spending could lead to an even [...]

Over on Progressive Economy Terry McDonough has written what I think is an important primer on the NAMA situation, one which goes through several options that are available to deal with our banks’ bad debts. They are ordered from best solution at the top - ‘a good back’ to the worst at the bottom ‘NAMA’, [...]