Tuesday, Feb 7th 2012
This article was originally published in the journal.ie last night.
How many speculators does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is none. They still think the broken one works.
The business model of asset price speculation - the model that broke the world - informs the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA), and it is [...]
Conflict of interest is so deeply embedded in Ireland, no one seems to notice
The cops were very swift to close down the demonstration in the NAMA building that Unlock NAMA occupied on Saturday the 28th. They haven’t been as swift though to investigate Anglo Irish Bank. A big blow to that investigation is due, apparently, [...]
On Wednesday 21 December 2011 Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan announced that NAMA were to make 2,000 properties available to the Government for social housing.
The units, which were said to make up 20% of NAMAs residential property portfolio would be managed by local authorities and housing associations and funded via the Social Housing Leasing [...]
I’m working on a paper on NAMA at the moment, but I’ve been so tied up with other stuff that I’m only getting around to reading its 2010 annual report.
It’s incredible stuff.
NAMA actually tells us that a number of the loans transferred in Autumn 2010 have serious title, security and paperwork issues.
But instead of working [...]
Hostile and Notorious: The Conditions of Private Property | MARK PASCHAL - Viewpoint Magazine
Very good essay here on the conditions around private property and how this relates to the occupy movement, specifically the recent occupations of buildings in the US. Of course, although the particular history of US property law maybe be slightly different to [...]
NamaWineLake has an excellent post on the relatively simple point that if the Kenny Report (first published in 1974) was implemented tomorrow the government could save the money that it expects to raise from the Household charge. Although capital programs have been cut back they are still acquiring land in order to build roads etc. [...]
I return again, like a dog to a buried bone, to the subject of the Grey Party (sorry Green Party). I took the opportunity, recently, of republishing their 2007 manifesto lest it be forgotten, and among its declarations was the Grey Party’s determination to:
‘Ensure the delivery of 10,000 social and affordable housing units a year [...]
With the crash in the Irish economy we started to hear a lot about the actions of ‘elites’, and their part in our downfall. But despite the short roll call of the most sinful developers, bankers and regulators, we still didn’t know how such elites operated. The lack of transparency within our economic and political [...]
The only enjoyable aspect of Eurostat’s decision to reclassify the Anglo-Irish Bank subsidy as a liability on the General Government Balance/Debt is to watch the Government’s hands move even faster in an increasingly vain attempt to prevent us from seeing under which shell the real deficit is hidden. But they must be getting tired; and [...]
Jane Gray on Ireland After NAMA makes an important point -which I missed last week - when wondering why there has been so much bile in ‘public discourse ‘directed at public sector workers at a time when a tonne and a half of public money is being used to make up for the mistakes of [...]
