Has anyone noticed that the media has gone into overdrive with all the talk of “The Recovery” in the last few days? Economists have been swarming the radio and the national papers talking about the positive effect of rising house prices on consumer confidence and the economy. There is never any mention of the negative impact on our competitiveness or the fact that the single biggest reason that the economy collapsed the last time was HIGH HOUSE PRICES.
It is almost as if the Fat Zombie Michael Noonan has been ringing around. I don’t know about everyone else but the term “The Recovery” is making me very angry.
I think the economy is gaining momentum in it’s recovery which is positive. But the idea that recovery is measured on house prices is bullshit. It’s a notion that a lot of Irish need to change.
Germany has shown recently that you can have a strong economy and no property bubbles
Disagree with macwilliams about wages, Ireland having still a relatively high unemployment and inflation at 0.5% is not a recipe for a surge in wages. Can’t see wages rising at any great speed for the next few years unless you are in the Public service…
No country in Europe is experiencing high wage growths even in countries with very low unemployment levels like Germany and Austria where unemployment rates are 5 and 4% and labour shortages so why would we have big increases in wages with unemployment at 11.5%?
I know a large chunk of contributors to/readers of the pin are Dublin based. (Nothing wrong with that btw!)
Speaking as a non-Dublin resident (Waterford), I have to say that there’s a very convenient Dublin-biased slant to most media coverage/detail of this recovery we “are all” enjoying.
Waterford’s economy has been brutally mauled over the last 6 years. Unemployment here still runs at 19%*.
For instance we see the CSO’s monthly figures report about Dublin and then non-Dublin property prices.
I’d LOVE to see a figure that excludes Dublin, Cork and Galway prices…I’d eat my gym sock if they turned out to anything better than flat/static.
I also spend some of my working time outside of Waterford city in surrounding counties, and I get a distinct vibe from the public at large of a rising resentment and anger at this media “propaganda” (as one principal of a primary school referred to it as last week when we met).
For a lot of joe taxpayers in these areas, neither their negative equity or job prospect dilemmas have shown any signs of improving in the last 18/24 months.
Not sure if the 9 o’colck news is being swallowed as hook-line-and-sinker as it used to be…
*Waterford’s history of unionisation and willingness to strike still stands against it…regardless of whether or not it’s still true of the Waterford workforce today, the reputation sticks. This, I acknowledge, is an extra hurdle to overcome that other cities/areas of Ireland do not.
I have to say I found McWilliams item about the surge in wages completely incoherent. I usually leave him a (usually negative) comment, but this time I just couldn’t think of where to start.
I would go so far as to say Germany shows it’s ***imperative ***that the price of housing is kept to a minimum in order to sustain a strong economy - especially one that encompasses a blue-collar manufacturing sector.
There seems to be lots of news coming out that cold be behind this (not just property prices)
Manufacturing output growth of 3.3% in Q1, 12.8% in Q2
Services sector growth of 3.1% in Q1, 0.9% in Q2.
Core Retails sales +0.6% in Q1, 1.2% in Q2
Car sales up 30% y.o.y.
Tourism numbers up 12.3% y.o.y
July Services PMI at 61.3
July Construction PMI at 61.2
Live register numbers at 5 year low
Number employed +2.3% y.o.y. in Q1 (6th consecutive quarter of employment growth). There will be nearly 100,000 more people in employment at the end of this year than at the start of 2013.
Number of redundancies at 5 year low
Tax receipts ahead of target
Exports +7.4% y.o.y
Q1 GDP +4.1% y.o.y (note that last year’s GDP figures were rebased to include blackmarket activities so this is not down to a change in measurement methods)
What term other than “Recovery” would you suggest people use?
The word itself is fine but the issue I have is when it is consistently used in connection with hyper inflation in a massively dysfunctional housing market
The pin had a surge of WIW (What’s it Worth) threads starting Q1 2012 however that nine quarter+ surge has now ended. We anticipate a recovery of the surge. We wait in dutiful obedience on our rock of ages.
As I said above, there’s plenty of factors that are giving rise to more commentators talking about “The Recovery”, it’s not just based on increasing house prices.
A primate city is one that is far larger than the next largest city in the country and is in a dominant position in the country. Nothing to do with monkey business.
