Money Ireland

Markets news on stocks, currencies and oil; The Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, confirmed today that the Irish Government has given an additional €2bn is being made available to the hemorrhaging Anglo Irish Bank to support the capital position of the bank. Meanwhile, the former State telco Eircom today confirmed plans to raise prices.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, today officially opened ESB’s 435 new megawatts gas-fired station at Aghada, Co Cork.  The station, close to Midleton in East Cork, now has the capacity to generate 963 megawatts of electricity. It is Ireland’s largest power station and ranks among the most efficient electricity generators in Europe.

Eurozone annual inflation is expected to be 1.6% in May 2010 according to a flash estimate issued by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union. It was 1.5% in April. In other news, the ECB (European Central Bank) said its M3 broad measure of money and credit supply in the common currency area, was [...]

Ryanair, which announced on Friday that former Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy had joined its board, today claimed the €10 travel tax is responsible for the collapse of Irish tourism. It suggests the recession is irrelevant in an argument for voodoo economics.

French insurance group AXA Global Distributors will create 200 ‘high value’ jobs in Dublin over the next 3 years. Recruitment has already commenced and it is estimated that 100 of the posts will be filled within the next 12 months.

Irish non-financial sector credit (NFC) credit, excluding valuation effects and the impact of transfers to the State toxic property loans agency NAMA, fell again in April, but at a slower pace than previous months so far in 2010. Residential mortgage lending outstanding (including securitised mortgages) declined by €348 million during April, bringing the annual rate [...]

The European Commission said today that its Consumer Confidence Indicator fell in in May;  the overall Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) slipped, moving back to 100.0 (-1.9 points) in the EU and to 98.4 (-2.2 points) in the Eurozone. While Industry sentiment continued to improve, all other sectoral sentiment indicators dropped in the EU and the [...]

Markets news on stocks, currencies and commodities; Markets in the UK and the US are closed Monday for public holidays. Meanwhile, several countries in Europe are cutting spending plans in response to the debt crisis and Italy was the latest to implement austerity measures last week. However, the Eurozone as a whole isn’t tightening its [...]

Principal news stories from the Irish Independent, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Financial Times and New York Times.

Irish economist Prof. Morgan Kelly of UCD isn’t the only one with a gloomy outlook on house prices and last week in Washington DC, IMF (International Monetary Fund) economist Prakash Loungani, forecast more falls in both the US and Europe.

Markets news on stocks, currencies and commodities; Irish new car sales in May overtake annual unit sales for the full year in 2009.

May survey data from Markit signalled a fifth successive monthly fall in Eurozone retail sales. The rate of decline continued to ease, however, and was the weakest seen in 2010 so far, reflecting the moderating influence of a further rise in French sales. The headline seasonally adjusted Eurozone Retail PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) edged up [...]

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, which is owned by Taiwan’s Hon Hai Group, said on Thursday that it is planning to raise wages for its workers in China by about 20 per cent after at least 10 workers have died this year from apparent suicides — half of them in May.

Principal news stories from the Irish Independent, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Financial Times and New York Times.

In Q4 2009, the number of persons in employment (seasonally adjusted) in the EU-27 fell to 220.8 million, 0.3 % less (-0.7 million) than in Q3 2009 according to labour market analysis by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office. The fall in the fourth quarter was the sixth quarter-on-quarter reduction in a row. Since the [...]

The renowned Depression era British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture in Dublin in April 1933 on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that America was abandoning the gold standard  – – the 1913 Federal Reserve Act provided that at least 40% of currency notes issued had to be backed by gold. 

Amid economic volatility, the global recession has refocused supply chain managers on the tradeoff between cost and resilience, according to Resilient Supply Chains in a Time of Uncertainty, a new research paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by software company Oracle.

Markets news on stocks, currencies and oil; Shares rise after China denies review of €512bn of Eurozone bond holdings; Q1 US GDP revised down to annualised rise of 3%.

Irish merchandise exports, seasonally adjusted, fell by 4% to €6.77bn between February and March 2010, while imports increased by 8% to €3.83bn, reflecting a recovery in the economy, according according to the Central Statistics Office.

The Government has announced that it will privatise health insurer VHI which was established in 1957.

OECD Factbook 2010: Household debt reached more than 120% of disposable income in UK, Canada, US, Japan and Ireland before onset of crisis in 2008.

Markets news on stocks, currencies and commodities; US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said today that the US and Europe are in “broad agreement” on the need for tighter regulation.

The Financial Regulator today published data on Irish mortgage arrears and repossessions for the period ended March 2010. The data show that at end March 2010 there were just over 791,000 private residential mortgage accounts in Ireland to a value of €118 billion. Of these 32,321 were in arrears for more than 90 days. The [...]

Japan’s exports rose strongly in April boosted by continuing robust demand from Asia with growth accelerating  to a seasonally adjusted 2.3 per cent in April from March’s 1 per cent, and imports rose 3.4 per cent.

Principal news stories from the Irish Independent, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Financial Times and New York Times.