It's sooo easy to make money that risk-taking is sooo blasé

[crashandburn]

Some quotes from the article…

‘THIS wasn’t supervised as closely as it should have been,’ conceded the chairman of the big British bank HSBC, after it dropped €1.5bn on bad mortgage loans in the USA.

One product is the beautifully named, “self-certified loan,” where the borrowers tell the bank how much they earn, and the bank believes them.
This produced the funniest of several hilarious excuses from HSBC. “It appears that when you ask people to declare their own income, they tend to exaggerate it,” one executive helpfully explained. Well, fancy that.

More at:
unison.ie/irish_independent/ … e_id=15280

[Blue_Horseshoe]

Well, it seems some investors are risk adverse, the Indo on the 6th Feb

DUBLIN’S property market has fallen drastically out of favour with international investors and is now viewed as “riskier than most”.

Last year international investors ranked Dublin as their seventh favourite European property market; however, a new report shows this ranking has now tumbled to 20th.

Worringly

“Capital flows are now dominated by domestic investors who may have different motivations and strategies than foreigners in the market. . . Recommendations are quite low for all property types, and the market is viewed as riskier than most.” The outlook for retail property was billed as particularly grim, with 44pc of investors putting ‘sell’ ratings on Irish retail, up from 25pc in 2006.

Strange, this comes at a time when rents have sky rocketed …

unison.ie/irish_independent/ … e_id=15223

Blue Horseshoe