About Ireland after NAMA blog
Ireland after NAMA was established after a one day symposium held in NUI Maynooth, on November 23rd, 2009, entitled ‘Geography after NAMA’. The event, attended mostly by geographers from across Ireland, sought on the one hand to discuss how the financial crisis was playing out at local, regional, national and international scales, and on the other to consider how Geography and social sciences more broadly should respond to the crisis in productive ways.
Ireland after NAMA uses the establishment of the National Assets Management Agency as a symbolic, watershed event in the evolution of the crisis. It therefore does not focus on NAMA per se, though it does provide commentary on the debate, policy and workings of that organisation. Rather it provides an informed analysis of the crisis – its history and its present unfolding – drawing on social science theory and empirical research. In particular, it presents a spatial and scalar reading that acknowledges that how the crisis is playing out is spatially uneven and unequal, affecting parts of the country in different ways, and its grounding in particular communities is the result of processes operating at different scales from the local through to the global; how the crisis is playing out in rural Ireland is quite different to the cities, which is quite different to the commuting belts and the border counties for a variety of reasons.
Over time, our hope is that Ireland after NAMA will become a useful resource of analysis and empirical data for those who wish to understand the tail end of the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s passage through the present crisis.
December 2, 2009 at 5:40 pm
The Dubai situation could be heralding the beginning of serious trouble for some EU countries like Ireland.
Competition for capital is increasing and our economic situation is looking less attractive to international financiers by the day.
It’s time for Mr. Cowen and Mr. Lenihan to rethink where they are leading us.
The current situation was flagged by Charlie McCreevy at a talk he gave to the annual dinner of the Institute of Taxation back in February this year.
He said the Government needed to produce a detailed plan of economic policy for the next several years; as such a plan was needed to help maintain international confidence in Ireland.
He said it was also essential that taxes on capital and work remained competitive.
“That will require a detailed and credible plan for reducing our indebtedness by laying out how, over a three- to four-year period, we intend to close the formidable gap between government income and spending,” he said.
He said the capital available for governments to borrow had never been so scarce.
“So it stands to reason that governments that bring forward the best-laid, the most detailed, and most credible plans for getting their budgets back to balance will be the governments that attract the capital at a sensible price; others will pay a hefty premium if, indeed, the capital is available at all.
Prophetic words indeed.
But his advice was not taken and very little has been done in this regard.
All government time and resources have been devoted to the NAMA project and the folly of that strategy is now beginning to unfold.
Gay Huey Evans, Barclay’s vice chairman of investment banking and leading banker for state funds, has said that sovereign wealth funds will be going for agriculture and other natural resource markets rather than financials in 2010 having had their fingers burnt in their investments in Western banks such as Citigroup and UBS during the early phase of the global crisis.
In 2010 they will be allocating a major part of a $94 billion investment programme in that sector.
So far this year agriculture, and energy especially, have drawn 61 per cent of total spend – or around $57 billion, according to Mr. Evans.
In 2008 the natural resources’ share was only eight per cent.
Sovereign funds have $3 trillion to invest.
The reason for this change in strategy is that many of these sovereign funds have come under pressure at home for losing billions of dollars on U.S. and EU banks.
Singapore fund Temasek lost an estimated $4 billion on Barclay’s and Merrill Lynch, while Kuwait lost on its Merrill Lynch and Citigroup bets.
China’s insatiable appetite for natural resources has spurred its sovereign funds to engage in multi-billion dollar deals in countries such as Australia recently. As a result the Western Australian economy, located around Perth, is booming and Clonmel based KENTZ Group recently won a $150 million contract in the region.
All throughout the past year Mr. Cowen you have repeatedly criticised people for being negative, will it ever occur to you that there are sound reasons for this sustained criticism.
You need to change your policies, there is nothing wrong with being wrong, the damage is only done when you don’t learn from your mistakes.