Daft Property - Irish Property News

Debt crisis to worsen as markets target Ireland... Ireland has lost control of its financial fate and its future is now in the hands of the markets, one of Europe's leading sovereign bond commentators has said. Luca Cazzulani, deputy head of fixed income at Italian-German bank UniCredit, said the Irish and Portuguese governments could do little to influence their fate because the markets had signaled them out from the so-called PIIGS - Portugal Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain - for extreme scrutiny. He forecast that key sovereign interest rates in Ireland and Portugal, which rose last week to more than 5.5%, were "unlikely" to fall back below 5% because markets were not anticipating good news from Europe. "If anything, we are likely to get further bad news," Cazzulani warned. Irish and Portuguese sovereign interest rates could stay "very high" for five or six months. "If so, then we are going to face a series of stresses because these levels are ...

Is it time to start thinking the unthinkable? If our membership of the eurozone was the cause of our woes, perhaps leaving the club would help fix things... AS the Greek financial crisis continues to worsen and shows signs of spreading to other eurozone countries, is it time to start thinking the unthinkable? With Portugal and Spain now in the firing line, we in Ireland need to start asking the hard questions about both our exchange rate policy and our debt mountain. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan was quoted as saying that leaving the euro would be a "disaster" for Ireland. "Were a country to contemplate leaving the euro there would a flight of capital and a collapse of the banking system", according to Mr Lenihan. While we have no reason to doubt the minister's sincerity, the fact that he is even discussing the issue, even if only to rubbish the possibility of Ireland exiting the single currency, demonstrates that the worsening of the Greek crisis h...

Ireland’s share of an EU sponsored bailout of Greece would be between €200 million and €400 million, according to an exercise carried out for a European think tank. Open Europe, a broadly Eurosceptic think tank based in London, has estimated what each EU country would be required to pay if Greece was unable to refinance its debts, of which €20 billion to €25 billion will mature in the coming two months. Under a series of possible systems, it estimated that Ireland’s share of the bill would be between €227 million and €406 million. The broad range was accounted for by uncertainty of the size of the bailout and the system used for calculating the contribution. Open Europe said that meeting the cost of the bailout could be either spread among all members of the European Union or confined to those who used the euro as a currency. Ireland’s largest exposure - of about €400 million - would arise if only eurozone countries were required to pay. Under the system, Germany could be required to p...

Ireland poses real threat to future of the euro, says top think-tank... Ireland has been identified as one of a small number of countries that poses "a real risk" to the future of the euro, according to reports in a Sunday newspaper. The report cites research from influential German think-tank CESifo, which warned of "very serious" slowdown in the Irish economy three years ago. The new research reportedly lists Ireland and Greece as two countries where international money markets see a significant risk of a sovereign default or an exit from the single currency. This perceived risk is reflecting in the markets for Irish and Greek debt, CESifo says, even though leaving the eurozone is not on the political agenda. Ireland, along with Finland, also comes in for a mention in CESifo's list of countries for which eurozone membership is "not optimal", due to our heavy reliance on trading with non-eurozone countries. Stable Against the backdrop of last week...

GOVERNMENTS have been drinking at the Last Chance Saloon when it comes to rescuing the world financial system, but it seems there is still a great reluctance to pay for the rounds. Last night's announcement from the emergency meeting of EU leaders fell short of the all-out strategy now being advocated by most economists. This would see governments putting fresh money (capital) into the banks so that they can begin counting and admitting all the capital they have lost through making loans which have not been repaid and, worse, buying loans and derivatives of loans at prices far above their real value. How far above was horribly illustrated on Friday at an auction of bonds issued by failed investment bank Lehman Bros. They were sold at less than 10 cents on the dollar, which means those banks which bought the bonds have lost over 90pc of their money. There is a general consensus now that losses in the global banking system are over a trillion dollars ($1,000 billion). It is an unimag...