Emergency procedures fail to reassure personal depositors → independent.ie/business/euro … 66139.html
The problem lies with the original government guarantee. The cretins should have guaranteed all the deposits but not the bondholders and other creditors. If they had done this, there wouldn’t have been a ‘run’ on the banks, depositors would have remained confident that the state may have been able to back up claims to be able to pay them.
Instead, we had the blanket guarantee - a bit like trying to bluff at poker in Vegas having shown your hand of 2 2s and expecting to win.
Anyway, howcome Keenan is still employed? the guy knows nothing.
I opened an account with ABN AMRO via post as well, took a good few emails but worked in the end.
Did a test transfer of a small amount a few weeks back from an Anglo ac/ to satisfy myself it all worked which it did. Interestingly I went back today to do a bigger transfer & was told that Anglo’s new masters AIB have stopped any transfers to non-Irish bank a/c’s so I’ll now have to route it via my existing current account instead. These new restrictions only came in the last few days or so they told me.
So the Swiss Franc is going to peg to the Euro, when people were depositing in Switerland were you converting to the CHF? And secondly were people depositing there to hedge against inflation or was it just a safe keep?
I kept my UBS deposits in Euros. My motivation was solely safe keeping.
I also kept my deposits in Euros. It was more to hopefully either be on the right side of a euro breakup or to keep it away from anything crazy happening in ireland. I’d rather have it there than here basically.
I also don’t want the added risk of currency exchange rates, especially as CHF looked unsustainably high to my mind. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen next with it - I don’t have much faith in their ability to peg the currency by threatening to buy unlimited amounts of foreign currency. That sounds like nonsense to me.
A country can easily limit the maximum value of its currency by printing more of it. Limiting the minimum value of a currency is another story entirely 
. So in this case it’s not nonsense at all.
However, it is completely and utterly bonkers for the Swiss to be spending their new found wealth on worthless paper currencies. Complete madness. They should just be out secretly buying stocks, commodities, property (yield appropriate) etc etc with their CHF. If they bought real hard assets in big enough size then the world’s appetite for the CHF would fall, and its value would also fall. Switzerland’s economy would return to competitiveness, and they would end up owning a bunch of great stuff.
But as it stands they are completely wasting their windfall by purchasing muck. Idiots.
Greece’s default always seemed inevitable, but now that it seems to be on the brink, with who knows what consequences for the Eurozone, I’m thinking much more strongly about getting some savings out of here. Not taking the plunge right this minute, but I want to make a specific plan (i.e. more specific than heretofore) for when I do. The way I’m thinking, CHF is overpriced, and NOK is fairly Euro and oil dependent, and a collapsed Euro will mean reduced oil demand. The obvious choice, both in terms of ease of set-up, and relevance in a post-Euro scenario, is Sterling. I am not looking to speculate on currency movements – this is a flight to safety (or perhaps one should say, possible less danger). Setting up an account in NI seems an equally obvious choice. I know some advice has been bandied around before, but I would appreciate any further views on the following:
- Which bank (for safety, ease of access/transfer, and interest rate)?
- How to convert EUR to GBP with minimum transaction costs?
- How much could one expect to pay/lose on amounts of several k EUR to several hundred k EUR?
Are you seriously considering putting your money into GBP as a flight to safety?! I think you need to do some reading about the state of the British economy, and the inevitable money printing that they will do to dig themselves out of their situation.
If you are happy with getting a yield of approx 5% per year then you can’t go wrong with good solid multinational stocks. Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Kraft, Johnson & Johnson etc etc. Or if you really want diversification then just buy shares in Berkshire Hathaway.
Having said that, there is nothing to stop these stocks falling 50% over the next few years. However if you are happy with a 5% real return over the long term then you needn’t worry about what price your fellow shareholders are dumping their shares on the market.
If you really need access to the money over the next 5 years then you should diversify into cash, gold, shares to try to protect yourself. Otherwise just stop your messing with trying to find a safe place for your money. Share certificates are very safe, and pretty much guaranteed to keep their value over the long run.
Uh, you’re asking me do I know about GBP, and you’re advising buying shares?? I have pension invested in equities and it has a negative return over 10 years. If that’s not “the long term” then we’re not on the same wavelength. The days of share investing as a reasonably safe bet are over for the time being. Yes, I know the Brits are in trouble. A steady decline in value of GBP due to inflationary money printing could be the lesser of two evils compared to what might happen to EUR.
Was your pension invested in “good solid multinational stocks” yielding 5% as per my post above? No, I didn’t think so. Meanwhile, if you had invested in Berkshire Hathaway ten years ago you would have been up 50% by now. Works out at about 4% per annum, not great but then again it was relatively expensive in 2001, as were the vast majority of stocks.
The whole point of investing should be to plan for your retirement. You have excess wealth now, so you put it aside now to spend later. 10 years is too short a term to be looking at - unless of course you plan on retiring before then.
And as an aside, you want to invest in things that are cheap - so you should be much more likely to invest in stocks if they have underperformed for a decade. Buy low, sell high.
Ok. I should’ve bought well performing stocks ten years ago. Check.
Can anyone else help with my questions about Sterling?
Personally,
I have an Ulster Bank account both north and south.
I used bluefxmarkets.com when buying sterling.
When the euro was at .885, Ulster Bank offered .865 and BlueFX offered .875. (approximately)
All charges etc were included in the rate.
Opening an A/C was pretty easy.
You agree a rate over the phone or by email.
You transfer money to BlueFX A/C.
They transfer money to your Northern A/C.
All very simple and straightforward.
You can get a decent rate from an FX broker, I use Currency Solutions in the UK. Others have been suggested here.
Isn’t the Fed supposed to be the main buyer of stocks since the Flash Crash? Doesnt inspire confidence.
My company Northern Trust, good solid multinational, was ranging between 45-55 since the crisis began. Recently it took a dive to 35, wouldnt like to have bought those solid stocks. Unfortunately I did tho through the employee share scheme.
I dont mind STG at all, I think its in the doldrums but must eventually come back.
Many thanks for the tips, guys.
So using someone like BlueFX the hit could be ~1% (each direction). Could be worse I guess.
I’ve used currency fair currencyfair.com/ a few times. The GBP/EUR spread is usually about +/- 0.5%, the charge for transfers is £3. Takes 3 days for money to arrive, had no problems with them so far.
Hi guys,
I’m not very techie and don’t understand how to go about getting dosh out of the country. Would appreciate an idiots step by step guide to setting up and transferring dosh outside of country. We sold our house a while ago and are looking to buy, so need access to dosh and don’t want to lose it with the way things are. Don’t understand how these currency transfer sites work. Dosh is currently in deposit account. Thanks
Dude I was just trying to help you avoid will very probably be a huge blunder for you. I really don’t understand your rudeness.
If your money is no longer safe in Irish banks then that very likely means that other European countries will also have defaulted, causing the Euro to collapse, and consequently causing the UK to devalue their currency to sustain competitiveness - causing sterling to collapse in value. This could all happen very very quickly.
I only mentioned the performance of the last 10 years because you brought up the subject!! My point was that you should buy stocks now that have good yields. Your pension dropped because it was invested in shit. If it was invested in non-shit then you would not have lost. It is easy to identify non-shit. Solid multinational companies with pricing power with good yields are non-shit.
Here’s hoping you have a pleasant trip to the UK some time soon.
I wasn’t being rude. I was just rolling my eyes at the advice to “buy low, sell high”. Easier said than done. That’s what my pension fund manager gets paid for, and he/she made a balls of it. How exactly are you expecting the average punter (e.g. me) to navigate the minefield that has been the equity markets for the last several years? I am steering clear of equities for the foreseeable future, and I am not alone in this strategy as you will see if you read back over this thread and others.
It seems you are reading what you want into what I wrote. My money is not in Irish banks. It is in Euro. The scenario you paint above is at worst a no-lose situation. The Euro collapses and Sterling collapses to match, so I haven’t lost anything. Now think of the other scenarios you haven’t considered – such as a Eurozone breakup with Germany on a new Deutschmark and the periphery on some kind of funny money. Which currency do you think Sterling will track – the Deutschmark or the funny money? Or a basket of all of them? At worst, Sterling improves against Irish funny money.
I doubt if my pension fund manager considered his/her investment decisions shit. And even if they were shit, there is a reasonable likelihood that – even if managing my own pension was an option, which it isn’t – my decisions would be just as shit. My job does not call for any investment expertise.
Now who’s being rude?
Again, it’s September 2011. what does mr. market say to us about the euro?
Mr market says he likes the euro compared to the dollar at a rate of circa 1.38:1. The euro commenced it’s life at circa $1.17.
And STG? Mr. Market says that’s about 1.15:1, while the all time low for STG in 2009 was around 1.08:1
As Buffett says we can always come back to Mr. Market and he will give us his price. Money printing has been tried repeatedly and is now an exhausted policy in the US and Britain. It hasn’t been tried yet in the EZ as a whole.