Ireland - Hero to zero!

StevieJ

Looks like they are about to be downgraded, the rating agencies were putting a 30 billion figure on this, anything over would be very bad news

bigheadxx

Irelands bank bailout has cost 20% of GDP. The cost of the UK bank bailout is 6% of GDP.

worldtraveller

An interesting viewpoint on this whole subject by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Telegraph today:

The party's over, the detritus is everywhere and the Irish people are holding their heads and blaming themselves and all the other partygoers for their monumental hangover.

It was the kind of lavish and uninhibited party you might expect from a convivial host who had just won the lottery.........

.....From the mid-1990s, Brand Ireland celebrated having moved beyond peddling a cultural heritage of disaffected writers and theme pubs presenting the same smiling face and diddly-ay-di music in San Francisco or Beijing, to become the ultimate role model for aspiring economies everywhere......

...... It all happened so quickly. The term "Celtic Tiger" first surfaced in a Morgan Stanley report in 1994, which noted a growth rate that bore favourable comparison with tiger economies like Hong Kong and Singapore....

.......Crony-capitalism was cool. Seanie FitzPatrick, the multi-millionaire who as Chairman of the Anglo-Irish bank specialised in lending vast sums to property developers, sat on the boards of Irish public companies......

.......By 2005 a middle-ranking civil servant might reasonably expect to have an easy job, a holiday apartment abroad, a cleaner from Eastern Europe, a house that was worth 20 times his income and a future in which he could watch his grandchildren grow up nearby.

Today the same person contemplates his worthless bank-shares, his maxed-out credit card, a dead property-market, wage cuts, tax rises and worse, and as unemployment soars he sees his desperate children becoming the latest generation of Irish emigrants. Like most of the Irish, he no longer trusts any institutions: politicians, the Catholic Church, bankers, regulators, he spits on them all, egged on by a sensationalist media.

Yet though the Irish are angry, they are also quiescent. As a Catholic people, we understand guilt, and the Irish know they contributed to their own downfall through greed, recklessness and overindulgence.

As for Seanie FitzPatrick, the bailing-out of whose bank may cost the Irish taxpayers €34 billion (£29 million) — 32 per cent of GDP — his hangover would seem to be less acute than that of the Irish people. Yes, he is bankrupt, but half of his property and pension pot were safely vested in his wife’s name.

Telegraph.co.uk

worldtraveller

StevieJ wrote: »

Looks like they are about to be downgraded, the rating agencies were putting a 30 billion figure on this, anything over would be very bad news

Moody's warned on Tuesday it may cut Ireland's credit rating again, saying additional austerity measures are needed given a huge bill for cleaning up its banks, a weak economic recovery and rising borrowing costs.

Ireland's deeply unpopular government says it could cost up to 50 billion euros ($68.5 billion) to unravel banks' property losses, driving the cost of Dublin's borrowing to almost three times that of Germany prompting renewed jitters about debt elsewhere in the euro zone.

While Moody's emphasized there must be additional fiscal rigor to begin repairing the country's battered finances, the ratings agency worried that prolonged austerity could cripple domestic demand with a knock-on impact on government revenues.

In the latest sign of growing distress in the real economy, Ireland's services sector shrank for the first time in six months in September following a sharp drop in domestic orders.

Tuesday's purchasing managers' index survey came on the heels of data last week indicating the manufacturing sector was also back in recession.

Reuters

Silverbull

Can anyone tell me how much house prices have crashed in Ireland so far?

worldtraveller

Silverbull wrote: »

Can anyone tell me how much house prices have crashed in Ireland so far?

DUBLIN: -43.3% PEAK (END 2006) TO DATE
OUTSIDE DUBLIN: -31.8% PEAK (END 2006) TO DATE
NATIONAL: -35.2% PEAK (END 2006) TO DATE

permanent tsb/ESRI House Price Index - Quarter 2 2010

At the peak in 2006 the average house price in Dublin was approx. EUROS 532,000 and nationally EUROS 395,000. The average fall in prices since then would therefore represent a fall of approx. EUROS 230,000 in Dublin property values and EUROS 139,000 nationally.

Commercial property prices are down around 60% from peak and land values down around 75%.

ILW

I believe they also have a massive amount of unsold houses, which if left to find a true market value, would make matters even worse. They are considering demolishing many of them.

posh*spice

It's not over either





Irish Housing Has Yet to Trough as Prices Decline, Report Says

Daft said the average cost of a home in Ireland has fallen 37 percent from its peak to an average 195,000 euros ($266,994). It also said that the total housing stock on the market remains at around 60,000.
“Reflecting the overhang of unsold stock and the weakness of demand conditions generally, commercial construction is likely to decline significantly this year,” the central bank said in its quarterly bulletin, when it cut its growth forecasts for this year and next. It also said further property-price declines are “in prospect.”

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a13e70Lgmu9Q

dopester

Abramovich might be regretting his August 2009 £126 million subordinated bonds play now, in Irish Nationwide.

Sounds like the Irish government want a big chunk of that money.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8042534/Roman-Abramovichs-Millhouse-warns-Ireland-of-legal-action-over-Irish-Nationwide-bail-out.html

Herbie_Hancock_I_wish

Just a point. One of my Dublin customers remarked that some properties in the city are down by 50%. The people I work for have been warned not to give too much credit to Eire customers.