The Irish banks are in crisis. Anglo Irish Bank has already been nationalised while AIB and BOI are also under pressure, and may not escape nationalisation even with the NAMA process. The biggest problem the banks face is the state of their loan books. We now know that a large portion of the loans they have [...]
Today the Government has announced a strategy that will see a €1 billion fund created to protect employment. From the RTE.ie link above it says; The Government told employers and unions that up to €1bn could eventually be made available to fund job protection measures as part of a recovery plan. Central to the strategy would [...]
Picture this; a set of traffic lights on a busy Cork city thoroughfare. Two cars abreast of one another. In one car; a young woman 30ish and her mother over 30ish. In the other; two teenager boys. Whilst paused at the red light one teenager boy rolls down the window of the car and throws [...]
As Steven Landsburg put it in The Armchair Economist ”economics can be summarised by just four words: ‘people respond to incentives’. All the rest is just commentary”. Expectant parents are people and when faced with incentives they too will respond. You might think that economics and incentives have little to do with the natural process of birth, but [...]