Good Times Are Gone

Editorial / Periscope - Niall O'Dowd

Good Times Are Gone

July 10, 2008

Periscope by Niall O'Dowd

THERE is little surprise in many quarters in America at the grimmer numbers about the Irish economy that are circulating these days.

The Irish media has been full of gloom and doom as the cheery numbers of the last few years have given way to a dawning realization that the good times are likely gone.

The Economic and Social Research Institute figures showing a looming recession and a return to emigration seemed to provide the kindling for the latest firestorm of media criticism about the handling of the economy.

Since 1983 there has not been a recession in Ireland, and the Celtic Tiger became the password for a booming economy that seemed to defy gravity at times as it seemed to stretch onwards and upwards.

No tree grows to the sky of course, and inevitably the reality has caught up with the hype. The general view now is that matters are going from bad to worse.

A boom based essentially on property prices, and inflated prices at that, was bound to end up in a bust. We are experiencing much the same thing in many regions of the country here in the U.S.

Speaking personally, I could never understand how house prices got so insane in Ireland, to the point where Dublin prices regularly outstripped Manhattan, probably the most lucrative island of real estate on earth.

I am no economist, but the fundamentals just did not add up. Wages for 90% of the people in Ireland could not possibly keep pace with the prices being asked in the booming property market — or with prices generally.

A banking friend who served in Japan during the housing slump there that set off a decade of near depression says the problem is similar in some respects. Your house is worth the inflated amount you think it is — until you try to sell it. Suddenly, with signs of a slowdown, everyone is trying to sell.

The problem is that it begins to resemble a Ponzi scheme. Those who got out while the going is good make a killing, but the ordinary Joe is likely to be caught in a vicious spiral of high mortgage payments on a declining home asset that he can’t sell for love or money.

Another friend who recently drove from Kerry to Sligo was struck by the glut of houses with for sale signs in every town along the way. The Japanese experience comes to mind, though it’s nowhere near that level yet in Ireland.

The other common complaint for American visitors to Ireland is the overpricing of just about everything. Even with a bad euro/dollar exchange, some thing seems out of whack when you are paying $6 for a cup of tea and $12 for a poor imitation of an American sandwich, as I did recently in a not so fancy restaurant outside Dublin.

The great investor, Peter Lynch, used to look to ordinary, everyday experiences to guide his stock picking. If his wife and daughter and their friends raved about a particular brand of panty hose, he researched the company and usually found out it was a good buy.

I have no doubt that Ireland would be a sell for him if he was listening to Americans talk about their experiences with the price of everything there over the past few years.

As it turns out, what ordinary Americans were telling me over the past few years was far closer to the truth, it seems, that what many of the highly paid economists back there with their boom and bloom forever philosophy and their dismissive attitudes to anyone who challenged them were saying.

I never begrudged Ireland its years in the purple. The country has gone through enough over the centuries, from Famine to war to mass emigration, to begrudge it a few good years in the sun.

I do not want to see a return of those bad times –- and an inevitable knock on over here of more undocumented to worry about at a time when the issue is so volatile as it is.

Yet that may be hard to avoid if the current circumstances continue. The new Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen has certainly been handed a baptism of fire in his new job but, to his credit, he appears to grasp just how serious the situation is.

Hardly a wet week in office, he is facing an economic crisis like nothing his predecessor faced in over a decade in the same job. How he handles it will define his legacy.

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