Day 1840 - I'm Calling it....

Yes folks the recession is over, officially December 15th as we exited the IMF Troika led Bailout. Nothing immediately changed and as is reported as of December 24th Christmas Sales are flat to lower than last year. However jobs are growing and employment is down while emigration is up. So a mixed bag, however with the inward investment that I can see in my own industry, corporations are positioning themselves for an upturn. The upturn will be gradual and largely unnoticed as the economy continues to shake out, a lot of repossessions and bankruptcies are to move through the system in the next few quarters, this will allow a lot of people in awful situations to move on. The biggest problem is still the banks, they don't have any money and are not in a position to lend, that is until an enterprising bank enters the market and they start to lose market share, remember BOS entering the market in '99 anyone..? However as it is the eve of Christmas and with good will to all, I predict using my patented Porsche barometer that from Q3 2014 we will see a significant improvement in the economy and peoples expectations, not quite there yet people but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel or is that just the door of Angela's hen coup as she checks her chickens

Day 1623 of The Recession

On a follow up to my last post, we are still in recession, although they would have you believe we are experiencing green shoots, let's see now, Greece is still owing 300m, Spain has 25% unemployment in its youth, although the King has sold his yacht, this helps some what. Our banking debt has been converted to Government debt ( our's) all 120m of it. However due to lack of supply house prices in Dublin have risen along side the rental market. The UK is moving decidedly toward the right with UKIP now challenging the Torys in their heartland. All in all a mixed bag, good points.......eeeem......it's not snowing, job market has stabilised, I am using my patented Porsche algorithm, this allows for the number of Porsche sightings to directly correlate with improvements in the economy. On the Porsche algorithm index of 1 to 5 with 5 being "Ireland has found to have the largest oil field in the world discovered in Ringsend" we are currently 1.5 a hug leap from being .5 a year ago.

Day 1398 of the Recession

In my last post I commented on the fact that Greece would be leaving the Euro and that Spain would be taking some Pain from the IMF, both clearly have not taken place. Yet the world is in no better shape and the Germans are using the tactic of delay in the hope that it will all improve if left alone. We have a new French Government in Place, the English are lost at see and have no focus, we are on the cover of Time for being good at taking abuse and Spain is in such a decline that I suspect that any amount of money is not going to prop it up. Fact being that if it was in anyway savable this would have happened already. Our much sought after separation of the sovereign debt from the bank debt deal, is now being pushed out to March of next year in the meantime we have to go through another painful budget with cuts around services and entitlements rather than with the people responsible for them, namely the civil servants. If we could get this deal across the line we would genuinely be in a better place and would make a much quicker recovery. Final note, the claim issued by the Central bank that it will take House prices 20 years to rise to Celtic Tiger levels, this is a load of bull, no one wants Celtic Tiger levels of house prices, we are all quite happy for a stable housing market where your house will appreciate in value along side inflation. Also it stated that wage cost are prohibitive, this is a direct reflection of the fact that we have the highest home ownership in Europe, it makes more sense in Germany for wage costs to be lower when over 50% of the population rent so a smaller % of your income goes out on living expenses than in Ireland.

Day 1278 of the Recession

As we head into the summer months, the world still finds itself troubled with Greece about to go its own way and Spain about to take some pain, how much is still to be decided. I am sure Christine Legarde of the IMF, who has been chiding Greeks for not paying tax while she enjoys a tax free salary, will decide how much pain to apply to Spain and Greece and leave Germany in a better position. Does it not dawn on people like Christine that the rest of us are the market place for German goods and if we have no money...... I am currently reading the biography of Harry S Truman, under the new deal that Roosevelt was implementing there were only 94 Republican Senators in the Senate and the house had less. He also had 4% of the population in 1935 controlled 80% of the money, so if Obama and America want to get a new deal in, they need to have less republicans around. Our own troubles in Ireland are compounded by the bank guarantee, we as a nation are now controlled by this debt, with no way to offset it. we have the faintest hope that NAMA will be able to sell off the 39B in assets and loans it now has at a small profit and only then will we be able to get out of the debt crisis we find ourselves in. This will prove to be a task too far, until we have debt forgiveness or indeed default we will not get rid of this debt. All those in favour of default stand up.......thought so, well you can sing for forgiveness.

Year end

Year end and where do we find ourselves as a country, people and individuals. out their in the Irish world, their are still people who are not affected by the recession, in fact they find everything a bit cheaper! and wonder why. The rest of us PAYE are Paying All Your Earnings to everybody but not recieving anything substantial for it. I am afraid that this is going to be the story for the moment and the conversation of choice around the dinner tables of D4. Slowley we see the 148 people classed with destroying the country getting their day in the courts as €€€ amount after €€€ amount is charged against them, we watch the deals being done and the bankruptcy's being entered into and take cold comfort from it.

Meanwhile people are ending up in John of Gods and St Pats and not understanding why they are there. The point being that as the year closes we all need to take a deep breath and listen to our fellow man, listen for signs of weakness, listen so they can talk and if you need to talk I hope that you find a listener. No judgements, no advice just listen. That's all people want and need for the moment, to understand that they are with the group and not isolated. So when you meet someone and go on about all the Christmas nights out and party's you have attended, listen and understand that they may not have been on any this year, may not have been out and have no prospect of getting out, they are only smiling at you to stop themselves from hitting you.

Day 1095 of the Recession

Well some of my ardent Blog followers may be wondering why I have waited 1095 days to make another pithy commentary on the recession, well to be truthful I was hoping it would have been over by now.... not to be.
Instead Ireland are been held up as the whipping boys for Greece to behave and come on side......listen hear Papandreau if you don't cut your costs we'll do to you what we did to Ireland......no no please Madam Merkel anything but that.
So my friends how has the recession been for you, comforted to know that while you struggle to keep a job, the cost of all basics are going up, your mortgage has gone up if you were not on a tracker and your income has gone down.
We now have a plethora of additional tax's with more to come, additional tolling to be added to the M50.
Funny how when you look into the recession and see that NAMA could sell 3 London hotels for the outstanding loans plus interest, then why couldn't these have been left with the banks and everybody sit tight and within 1000 days off load the loans for face value, a bit of funding to keep the banks on day to day running and they may have been able to sort out there own balance sheets without costing the tax payer
Funny how there is talk of over supply of apartments in the city, 25,000 talked of, yet when you look into it there is only 4,500 apts for rent and a shortage of apts in some areas with strong rents holding up in all areas of the city.

If we had all set tight what might have been for a lot less money.

Then and now.

The date was December 11th 1984, the venue was the Aragon Ballroom on Lawrence avenue in Chicago. The event was the 3rd leg of the Unforgettable Fire tour by U2. A young man who had arrived in the summer of '84 ( live aid hadn't happened yet for Bono) went to his first U2 concert. I remember them playing "Sunday" and at the end everybody was singing 40. It took a cold Chicago night in an ancient ballroom to make a fan. I remember them stopping the concert to allow the crowd to push back as there was crushing up front, I remember thinking how I hadn't really heard of them.

To the present and a warm evening in Croke Park on the 25th July 09, just a quick 25 years later and a dad brings his 11 year old boy to see his first rock concert, his arms wrapped around me and rocking out. When they played "Beautiful Day" early on the tears rolled down my cheeks...