Nationalisation Watch / Govt. rethinking 3.5 billion bailout for the banks?

Squire wrote:

Cactus Flower.

Believe unemployment up to 6.8%. Highest since 1998 and likely to increase.

UK Industrial production down.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2b4a3914-7ec6-11dd-b1af-000077b07658.html

This is despite sterling being weak and a narrowing trade deficit. It is recession!

One of the things that makes this such a bad one is that the housing and construction slump is coinciding with negative employment pressures from a profound shift of industry from west to east, with narrowing profit margins, rising oil, gas and food prices as an extra factor driving the whole thing along. We've been talking about it for a long time in a theoretical way and now its reality.

Joan Burton, who looks as knackered as Lenihan, is playing a blinder.

CF

I agree, you know my views.

Squire wrote:

CF

I agree, you know my views.

I do. I left a whiskey for you in the Decontamination Chamber.

Cheers.

Well it seemed mean to go to sleep when they were hard at it in the Dail. The Bill seems to have been passed with little or no amendment.

Will read it in the morning.

Goodnight.

interest rates believed to be falling shortly. could that stimulate the property market (both purchasing and renting)?

I've just realised that none of my money is protected by this, being stashed in Ulster Bank and the CU. Good thing I don't pay (direct) taxes!

Most of our money was protected anyway. How many people have more than a hundred grand on deposit? 1 per cent of the population, perhaps? I know on the UK news they are saying that with their £35,000 (€48,000) deposit protection guarantee 97 per cent of savings are secure.

Unless you have more than €100,000 on deposit you are fine, 905 - because you are covered by the other guarantee. I presume that is the case anyway.

This was done more to protect commercial credit flows than consumer credit flows I would imagine. The large American firms probably have millions in bank accounts over here and it was the outflow of that which was creating a hazard.

Anyway, from what I have heard from a few people, they were quite right that a bank was about to collapse.

905 wrote:

I've just realised that none of my money is protected by this, being stashed in Ulster Bank and the CU. Good thing I don't pay (direct) taxes!

Actually, your Ulster Bank savings are guaranteed up to €100K under the previous scheme. People are missing this and it is causing problems for UB, BOS etc.

johnfás wrote:

This was done more to protect commercial credit flows than consumer credit flows I would imagine. The large American firms probably have millions in bank accounts over here and it was the outflow of that which was creating a hazard.

Anyway, from what I have heard from a few people, they were quite right that a bank was about to collapse.

Yes this has more to do with commercial. It will also fed through to the property sector! As for Banks they are not out of the woods just yet.

Agreed Squire - there is no such thing as a quick fix.

http://www.breakingnews.ie/World/mhidauaugbey/

ibis wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Hard to believe it's all Fianna Fáils fault

Man, how the feck did we get so up ourselves?

It's only FF's fault in that they didn't stop us - and, heck, we wouldn't have voted them in again if they had. Nobody made us act like we were the Beveley Hillbillies.

Ibis, that's almost like saying slavery societies went on for centuries, so lets blame the slaves shall we?

The rate of change is much quicker today, but you ignore the institutional effects of all manner of institutions and markets and media etc on the peoples' preferences and views, in that statement.

Pax wrote:

ibis wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Hard to believe it's all Fianna Fáils fault

Man, how the feck did we get so up ourselves?

It's only FF's fault in that they didn't stop us - and, heck, we wouldn't have voted them in again if they had. Nobody made us act like we were the Beveley Hillbillies.

Ibis, that's almost like saying slavery societies went on for centuries, so lets blame the slaves shall we?

Not even slightly. Slaves had no choice but to be slaves. We have the choice to (a) hold our politicians to account, and (b) to act sensibly. It's not much to ask.

Pax wrote:

The rate of change is much quicker today, but you ignore the institutional effects of all manner of institutions and markets and media etc on the peoples' preferences and views, in that statement.

You're hardly claiming that we are the helpless pawns of said influences. Well, perhaps you are, because it is necessary for any utopian to believe that.

ibis wrote:

Pax wrote:

The rate of change is much quicker today, but you ignore the institutional effects of all manner of institutions and markets and media etc on the peoples' preferences and views, in that statement.

You're hardly claiming that we are the helpless pawns of said influences. Well, perhaps you are, because it is necessary for any utopian to believe that.

This is very interesting now - can a bubble be fuelled and stoked, even if there is no design behind except blind 'positivity'? Someone on politics.ie a few days ago pointed it out about all the RTE shows which focused on building and renovating houses and homes. A lot of the Duncan Stewart projects, now that I think of it, were extremely elaborate and entailed borrowing in excess of 100k in order to renovate a home and well in excess of that to do a fancy new build. We saw very little of the Eddie Hobbs style caution until towards the end of the bubble and McWilliams as well disappeared from TV3 where he had a Sunday morning show which I used to watch. McWilliams generally preached against this fuelling of the balloon. I know he was writing in the Tribune and elsewhere but print doesn't have the power of that hopeless little screen does it?

But our government or one of its bodies could have financed tv programmes about energy conservation in the home which entailed borrowing 10k - 20k and perhaps the government regulator could have chosen a low-cost loan for that kind of thing - as is being proposed now. Just after Duncan was over then you had Katherine Tnomas giving you a choice of Costa holiday homes ... at which time Eddie Hobbs was becoming less and less of a Cork leprechaun poking you in the buttocks over your worsening finances and was starting to make more and more sense to some people.

I'd argue that culture somehow gets around and the culture of home-buying panic got around which bulldozed over our better judgement. I wonder how many people there are in Dublin earning good salaries who worked all their lives and are good workers and will continue to work all their lives but cannot manage to buy even an affordable home because their salary is too high yet not high enough to afford a full mortgage. Some of these people went into mortgages with friends and some just resorted to renting at exorbitant prices. I hope that the market is in their favour now and they have the motivation to move and save themselves a small fortune on their rent. Maybe we'll even see a bargaining culture emerge where the renter will stay long term as long as he gets the option to buy the property. This might have to happen because of the inability to sell for some people who are in negative equity (the real meaning of which is trying to finance a clump of investment properties through the bad times)

Not everyone has the power to make a free choice - for many hard-working people in ordinary jobs the idea of making a serious economic choice is either an academic exercise or is governed simply by their power to spend. From the late nineties on and in terms of property, that spending power dwindled for those people as I said who are long-term workers with few pretensions or dreamy crazy house plans. Many people were not catered for in this bubble - the poor and the then 'renting rich' (not earning enough to get mortgages but with high disposable income which they spent on luxury items). Banks could have been encouraged to offer products focusing on savings (I think the SSIA scheme was one of the more positive things that appeared there yet where is McCreevy now? was he making the wrong noises at the time I wonder?) and banks could have been kinder to those long-term workers (who will end up taking the burden on their shoulders now) but serious efforts should have been made to cool the market, drawing it out for another five or ten years, I felt, and leaving us with more sustainable property as well as infrastructure underneath. But "The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long". We let ourselves be subject to a remorseless mechanism that needed shepherding but didn't get it.

I recently had the pleasure of using a 'whacker' - ever used one? It's a heavy, petrol-driven vibrating machine with the aspect of a lawnmower but weighing 10 stone used for whacking loose concrete and rubble into foundations of buildings or roads. Unless you keep your hands on the handles of that thing it'll whack all around it mercilessly and cause unknown havoc until the petrol has burned out. Maybe the one I had wasn't so sophisticated though.

Don't forget renters - you can apply for tax relief on your rent, can move whenever and whereever you wan't, don't have to have a sinking fund for roof repairs and don't have a lifetime debt around your neck

ibis wrote:

Pax wrote:

ibis wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Hard to believe it's all Fianna Fáils fault

Man, how the feck did we get so up ourselves?

It's only FF's fault in that they didn't stop us - and, heck, we wouldn't have voted them in again if they had. Nobody made us act like we were the Beveley Hillbillies.

Ibis, that's almost like saying slavery societies went on for centuries, so lets blame the slaves shall we?

Not even slightly. Slaves had no choice but to be slaves. We have the choice to (a) hold our politicians to account, and (b) to act sensibly. It's not much to ask.

Pax wrote:

The rate of change is much quicker today, but you ignore the institutional effects of all manner of institutions and markets and media etc on the peoples' preferences and views, in that statement.

You're hardly claiming that we are the helpless pawns of said influences. Well, perhaps you are, because it is necessary for any utopian to believe that.

I have to say that Pax has a point. FF may not be to blame but what has happened has not been an act of God. It was not a victimless crime and the perpetrators did not go without benefit. Whether we all benefited to some extent is not clear as sustainable economic practices might have yielded even more fruit. We are entitled to know who is to blame, how it happened and how it persisted. More than that, it is important that those who caused or allowed this mess are now made to pay the price and that the process of reform is transparent. We must not be like the soldiers of world war one, marching to the drumbeat of the greedy few.

I don't think it's too difficult to figure out what has happened but I think the politicians need to spell it out for us honestly so that we can make informed (i.e., democratic) decisions to fix it. The main problem to date has been a lack of transparency from the citizen's perspective. Now that the citizen is footing the bill he is entitled to tear up the floor boards not only on bad debts in banks but on the whole system. Whoever doesn't have the stomach for the job should step back or be pushed aside.

Ireland's greatest problem now and going forward is the complete lack of collegiality which has always existed, but is becoming increasingly exposed. Having the wish to both have one's cake and eat it will eventually come back to haunt you.

johnfás wrote:

Ireland's greatest problem now and going forward is the complete lack of collegiality which has always existed, but is becoming increasingly exposed. Having the wish to both have one's cake and eat it will eventually come back to haunt you.

I don't think so. The whole thing has been too collegial. The prudent bankers didn't ridicule the reckless bankers, the brokers didn't question the real value of shares, the politicians haven't pointed the finger at the regulators or the civil service. Anybody who was uncollegial and questioned it risked exclusion from the group. In retrospect, the virulent attacks on economists may fall into this category. Collegiality is good but you'll often find that it is the incompetent and the imprudent who look for its benefits the most. Genuine collegiality should stop where recklessness, fraud and massive incompetence begins.

I don't mean internal collegiality - I mean external.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

johnfás wrote:

Ireland's greatest problem now and going forward is the complete lack of collegiality which has always existed, but is becoming increasingly exposed. Having the wish to both have one's cake and eat it will eventually come back to haunt you.

I don't think so. The whole thing has been too collegial. The prudent bankers didn't ridicule the reckless bankers, the brokers didn't question the real value of shares, the politicians haven't pointed the finger at the regulators or the civil service. Anybody who was uncollegial and questioned it risked exclusion from the group. In retrospect, the virulent attacks on economists may fall into this category. Collegiality is good but you'll often find that it is the incompetent and the imprudent who look for its benefits the most. Genuine collegiality should stop where recklessness, fraud and massive incompetence begins.

Very interesting posts, Zhou. You could add to that the media, who were inevitably compromised by a massive income from property sector advertising, IBEC that was sucked into government funded grant induced torpor, the political parties that new it was unsustainable but made election promises for increased spending: they all helped to prolong the fiction out of self interest. People working in banks came under enormous pressure to "perform" in competition with colleagues. A bubble has its own impetus. It draws in a lot of inexperienced people very quickly and creates a pressure cooker environment.

It is very serious that we are now facing into the collapse of an intense local housing bubble along with loss of competitivity, in the middle of a world recession. None of these things are imo the result of the moral badness of people. They are recurring features of the economic system. They were all foreseeable and foreseen and people have the right both to challenge the system and the people who have run it. And cheers again to our economists who kept on saying it how it is. We need these people together in some kind of forum to help put together a plan in the interests of the whole population - I'm sorry but I simply do not believe this government is up to it. Brian Cowen's speech last night seems to suggest he is in total denial. He won't come to the Dail and just speaks to the business sector.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

ibis wrote:

Pax wrote:

ibis wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Hard to believe it's all Fianna Fáils fault

Man, how the feck did we get so up ourselves?

It's only FF's fault in that they didn't stop us - and, heck, we wouldn't have voted them in again if they had. Nobody made us act like we were the Beveley Hillbillies.

Ibis, that's almost like saying slavery societies went on for centuries, so lets blame the slaves shall we?

Not even slightly. Slaves had no choice but to be slaves. We have the choice to (a) hold our politicians to account, and (b) to act sensibly. It's not much to ask.

Pax wrote:

The rate of change is much quicker today, but you ignore the institutional effects of all manner of institutions and markets and media etc on the peoples' preferences and views, in that statement.

You're hardly claiming that we are the helpless pawns of said influences. Well, perhaps you are, because it is necessary for any utopian to believe that.

I have to say that Pax has a point. FF may not be to blame but what has happened has not been an act of God. It was not a victimless crime and the perpetrators did not go without benefit.

Perhaps more a case of it not being a perpetrator-less crime, then, in contrast to me characterising it as being largely self-inflicted?

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Whether we all benefited to some extent is not clear as sustainable economic practices might have yielded even more fruit. We are entitled to know who is to blame, how it happened and how it persisted. More than that, it is important that those who caused or allowed this mess are now made to pay the price and that the process of reform is transparent. We must not be like the soldiers of world war one, marching to the drumbeat of the greedy few.

I think there's a couple of interconnected crises involved here, though. First, and most dramatically, there's the liquidity crisis in the banking sector - the 'credit crunch' - where banks can't borrow from each other because they're all afraid to lend. That crisis is essentially the result of an incompetent herd mentality amongst the bankers, with a systemic failure to identify risk properly and a driving urge to chase down every last opportunity for lending, to the point where the banks were moving into loan shark territory (without the required large gentlemen).

That's what we might call the supply side of the problem. The other side of the problem, though, is that we, the people, wanted credit, and have not used it wisely. That's the demand side of the crisis. Not a single one of us had to use cheap credit to bid a little bit more for the house we wanted, but we did - and when we did, we pushed others down the same road. The banks didn't inflate the property bubble - that was us. Sure, the banks facilitated us in doing so by lending ever higher multiples of real earnings - but nobody made us lie about our earnings, and the rising house prices we were chasing were being pushed by us, not them. Nobody made anybody borrow against one house to subsidise the purchase of another.

And while there was undoubtedly a chorus of cheerleaders egging us on to spend and buy, they're not some kind of evil conspiracy against us - they're us, too, in our day jobs. Most persuasive of all, in any case, was the pressure from our peers - the gleeful recounting of property profits, the competition to have made the most, got the best. We became a nation of rogue traders dealing in a single product - property futures.

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

I don't think it's too difficult to figure out what has happened but I think the politicians need to spell it out for us honestly so that we can make informed (i.e., democratic) decisions to fix it. The main problem to date has been a lack of transparency from the citizen's perspective. Now that the citizen is footing the bill he is entitled to tear up the floor boards not only on bad debts in banks but on the whole system. Whoever doesn't have the stomach for the job should step back or be pushed aside.

There's a 'moral hazard' here, alright - if the banks are bailed out, they're not paying for their stupidity, we are. On the other hand, if they're not bailed out, we pay even more, and unpredictably. A wholesale bank collapse is one of the few things that really could bring us back to the Eighties. And there's moral hazard for us, too, if we don't have to pay the price of our own greed and short-sightedness.

Ibis said

Quote :

That's what we might call the supply side of the problem. The other side of the problem, though, is that we, the people, wanted credit, and have not used it wisely. That's the demand side of the crisis. Not a single one of us had to use cheap credit to bid a little bit more for the house we wanted, but we did - and when we did, we pushed others down the same road. The banks didn't inflate the property bubble - that was us. Sure, the banks facilitated us in doing so by lending ever higher multiples of real earnings - but nobody made us lie about our earnings, and the rising house prices we were chasing were being pushed by us, not them. Nobody made anybody borrow against one house to subsidise the purchase of another.

That I can't agree with: rising house prices were a result of supply (undersupply until 2006), demand (rapid increase in household numbers) and purchasing power increase (big increase in earnings), not moral turpitude of feckless young couples.

Yes, some people gambled on price increases when they bought to let. Risk is inherent in the market economy. The Banks have professional risk assessment advice, and some Banks have succeeded in avoiding toxic assets and unrepayable loans.

On the wholesale bank collapse, Sweden handled its comparable situation by letting the banks go down, nationalising them, sacking the management, putting them back into shape and writing off the bad debts. There was very little public loss.

The Government has made a holy show of us with this phony guarantee Cowen is beginning to back off it already, initially by saying that 'there is no agreement yet with such and such a bank' and 'full market price will have to be paid for the insurance''. It is such a mess I don't know where to start.

I just went to the bank to lodge a cheque and there was a queue of people there to lodge mattress money stretching out of the door and down the street.
They may well be back again to take it out the week after next.

I find there is a large queue in all banks on a Friday afternoon cactus because they are not open on the weekend. Are you sure that it was indicative of the economy or merely the opeining hours of the banks?

In the minor defence of the Government, they are going to place representatives on the boards of the banks, any bank who receives assistance will have shares issued to the Government and there are going to be enforced management changes, though the precise details of these are ridiculously unclear. The situation, whilst not Sweden sounds closer to it than you might suggest. Furthermore, presumably our situation is not precisely the same as Sweden's was?

cactus flower wrote:

Ibis said

Quote :

That's what we might call the supply side of the problem. The other side of the problem, though, is that we, the people, wanted credit, and have not used it wisely. That's the demand side of the crisis. Not a single one of us had to use cheap credit to bid a little bit more for the house we wanted, but we did - and when we did, we pushed others down the same road. The banks didn't inflate the property bubble - that was us. Sure, the banks facilitated us in doing so by lending ever higher multiples of real earnings - but nobody made us lie about our earnings, and the rising house prices we were chasing were being pushed by us, not them. Nobody made anybody borrow against one house to subsidise the purchase of another.

That I can't agree with: rising house prices were a result of supply (undersupply until 2006), demand (rapid increase in household numbers) and purchasing power increase (big increase in earnings), not moral turpitude of feckless young couples.

Yes, some people gambled on price increases when they bought to let.

250,000 empty properties - they didn't sell themselves. Grossly over-inflated property prices - they didn't go up by themselves. An annual investment in overseas property rising to nearly €10bn in 2007 - since 2000 the Irish have invested tens of billions of euros in property abroad, frequently leveraged off the back of the inflated asset price here - the money didn't fall off trees.

People borrowed like interest rates would never rise and property prices never fall - and they did it in the hope of getting rich with little or no effort. Ordinary people - taxi drivers, hairdressers, bank clerks.

ibis wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

Ibis said

Quote :

That's what we might call the supply side of the problem. The other side of the problem, though, is that we, the people, wanted credit, and have not used it wisely. That's the demand side of the crisis. Not a single one of us had to use cheap credit to bid a little bit more for the house we wanted, but we did - and when we did, we pushed others down the same road. The banks didn't inflate the property bubble - that was us. Sure, the banks facilitated us in doing so by lending ever higher multiples of real earnings - but nobody made us lie about our earnings, and the rising house prices we were chasing were being pushed by us, not them. Nobody made anybody borrow against one house to subsidise the purchase of another.

That I can't agree with: rising house prices were a result of supply (undersupply until 2006), demand (rapid increase in household numbers) and purchasing power increase (big increase in earnings), not moral turpitude of feckless young couples.

Yes, some people gambled on price increases when they bought to let.

250,000 empty properties - they didn't sell themselves. Grossly over-inflated property prices - they didn't go up by themselves. An annual investment in overseas property rising to nearly €10bn in 2007 - since 2000 the Irish have invested tens of billions of euros in property abroad, frequently leveraged off the back of the inflated asset price here - the money didn't fall off trees.

People borrowed like interest rates would never rise and property prices never fall - and they did it in the hope of getting rich with little or no effort. Ordinary people - taxi drivers, hairdressers, bank clerks.

No - at least 140,000 of them according to the ESRI are holiday homes and others are houses under construction. It is quite interesting reading this piece in the Indo in 2006 explaining why in their view there was still strong demand for houses.

http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/property/irelands-empty-house-hangover-67970.html

Property prices were pushed up by the factors I listed in my last post, and also particularly in the last couple of years by a very large increase in development constributions to infrastructure. Over a third of the price of a house is taxation of various forms.

A lot of people did well for themselves by buying to rent multiple tax incentive properties - as you say - money for nothing - up to about 2005. Someone who has 20 properties for which they paid next to nothing is still better off than someone who did not. When mortgages went higher than rents it was a clear warning that that market was no longer viable. The people who were badly stung or lost out were as usual the late entries to the market 'outside the loop' and the people who weren't earning enough to pay tax.

There has been a clear history of an increasingly robust economy up to 2002 and an acceptable one up to 2004-5. At that time there was a high level of awareness that competitivity was being lost and that public expenditure costs were rising without visible improvement. It was obvious that both the government and individuals were spending more than their sustainable earnings. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael both chose to go to the electorate with the line that the economy was healthy and could withstand a big increase in public spending. They did this in the teeth of what almost all the economists were saying. They also chose to rely heavily on the property sector for taxation and to allow the hyper-wealthy to pay no tax at all. Both of these parties in my opinion bear a heavy responsibility for where we are now.

Is it just me who feels George Lee appears to be getting an increased ego with every additional day that he is the main article on RTE News.

Perhaps it is time we had someone else on to discuss the economy, even for one night.