Economy – Page 4 – Slugger O'Toole

A Tale of two Budgets…

Frank Schnittger on October 5, 2022, 9:49 am

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Piggy bank

The contrast between how the recent budgets in the UK and Ireland have been received by the markets and the general public couldn’t be greater and tells us much about where the respective economies are currently at. (Let us ignore the distinction that the UK budget was officially dubbed a “Fiscal Event” rather than a formal budget. That euphemism has uncomfortable resonance with the Russian “Special Operation” rather than the invasion of Ukraine). In Britain £45 Billion in unfunded tax …

Spiralling down in a whirlpool wheel spin of casino economics…

Roy Uprichard on October 1, 2022, 8:43 am

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#ENGAGEMENT

Picture a late November Advent evening last year. In a deconsecrated East Belfast church set midst where Morrisonian nostalgia lingered for decades. Oval shadowed across the way from Samson and Goliath’s stilled steel. In Mersey Street – with the heat from the wood-burning stove escaping far too quickly, swallowed in the shiver of a high, vaulted ceiling, atop paint peeling walls. Something hard to achieve, I thought – this authentic distressed look. Though somehow fitting. When we heard the story …

Why the neo-Thatcherites’ gamble is doomed…

Andy Boal on September 28, 2022, 7:00 am

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calculator, calculation, insurance

“Trickle down economics never existed in the first place, just in the minds of those who don’t like tax cuts” said a friend of a friend, citing a 2015 Spectator article by Thomas Sowell on the same subject. He proceeded to describe the “basic premise of conservative economics [as being] that the most effective way to help people out of poverty is to grow the market, [which] creates opportunity for people on the lowest rungs to earn wages”, which sounds …

Pound crashes to $1.03 against the dollar. Have the Tories wrecked the UK economy?

Brian O'Neill on September 26, 2022, 11:50 am

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pound, coins, currency

The Conservative Party likes to be thought of as the party of fiscal responsibility, but that reputation is lying in tatters. First, they gave us Brexit, which hurt trading arrangements, increased red tape and discouraged immigration to the UK. Now the markets have reacted to their shameless budget for the rich by kicking the sh*te out of the pound and increasing UK government bond interest rates. The UK is a net importer of goods, from the Office for National Statistics: …

Houses of sand: Unionism has a problem with younger voters. A huge one.

Sarah Creighton on September 24, 2022, 9:50 am

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Whither the union. I find myself becoming weary as I write this. Articles about the demise of the union, about unionist malaise and mistakes, are so common these days that they all sound the same. I stopped writing them at one point because I had nothing new to add. Even now, people write these pieces with a weird air of arrogance. They want you to know that they and they alone have figured out that unionism is in a difficult …

The UK Chancellor delivers a budget for the rich…

Brian O'Neill on September 23, 2022, 8:57 pm

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White shirt and gold watch

If you want to see Neoliberal ideology in action, look no further than today’s budget. It defies everything – common sense, economic orthodoxy, morality, and even traditional Conservative belief in sound public finances. It is economics 101 that to stimulate the economy, you need to give more money to poor people. Give an extra £20 a week to low-income people, and they will spend it in on groceries, clothes, fast food etc. In contrast, the rich already have everything they …

Sinn Féin’s horsey metaphor on pensions does Trojan work before quickly running out of steam…

Mick Fealty on September 21, 2022, 5:12 pm

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sculpture, horse, steel ross

Miriam Lord is on fire today in the Irish Times. Anyone watching RTÉ yesterday (or indeed Virgin Media One) will have noticed a big flare up over the government’s pensions. He’s the short version of how that changed in less than a day. “The cat is out of the bag,” cried Mary Lou McDonald, enjoying a hey presto! moment in the Dáil. “Let us call it what it is: a Trojan horse.” So the cat is out of the bag and …

The poorest Irish have a standard of living almost 63% higher than the poorest in the UK…

Brian O'Neill on September 17, 2022, 7:28 pm

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Interesting article about income inequality from John Burn-Murdoch over in the FT. From the article: Starting at the top of the ladder, Britons enjoy very high living standards by virtually any benchmark. Last year the top-earning 3 per cent of UK households each took home about £84,000 after tax, equivalent to $125,000 after adjusting for price differences between countries. This puts Britain’s highest earners narrowly behind the wealthiest Germans and Norwegians and comfortably among the global elite. So what happens …

Revisiting Nuclear Power : Part 3 : Can it be weaponised ?

Brendan Heading on August 29, 2022, 12:24 pm

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Nuclear explosion mushroom cloud

Following on from my previous articles on how nuclear power works, and why we need to rethink the dangers posed by it, it’s time to talk about the other safety-related concerns that are often raised in the debate about the viability of nuclear power. Can a nuclear power station explode like a nuclear bomb ? What happens if a nuclear power station finds itself in the theatre of military conflict, as is currently happening in Ukraine ? To deal with …

The latest polls are not good news for those of us who love the United Kingdom

Andy Boal on August 22, 2022, 7:00 am

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To be polite, I have been… annoyed by the shenanigans over the NI Protocol. Unfortunately, real life has taken up too much time to allow me to writing for Slugger in recent months. This Irish passport holder who was born British and Irish, will die British and Irish, and quite frankly has better things to worry about than whether Belfast is in the United Kingdom or an independent Ireland, has been extremely frustrated by the (to continue to be polite) …

“We want to thank the British people…”

Brian O'Neill on August 18, 2022, 6:32 pm

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Big Ben

This is a great bit of viral marketing from the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, which google tells me is a trade union for workers in the transport and travel industries in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This is an eye opener pic.twitter.com/PMplLC75cc — Valerie Farrington 💙 (@Valhalla51) August 17, 2022 The video does a fantastic job of exposing how much of Britain’s privatised infrastructure has been gobbled up by European State Owned companies. According to full fact: The French government …

Revisiting Nuclear Power : Part 2 : The Danger

Brendan Heading on August 7, 2022, 7:00 pm

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A couple of weeks back, I wrote a little about how governments are reconsidering their attitude to nuclear power, and talked about the mechanics of how a reactor works and how it can solve the problems of getting us to net zero carbon emissions and securing energy supply in the long term. But we can’t gloss over the bad reputation that nuclear power has. Can’t it blow up, like a nuclear bomb ? And haven’t there been a number of …

Can we save Belfast City Centre?

Brian O'Neill on July 21, 2022, 7:25 am

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Before the pandemic, I visited a client’s office in Belfast City Centre. They were on the 7th floor of a building near City Hall. While waiting in reception, I could look over Belfast and marvel at all the construction work. At that time, Belfast was buzzing with many new companies investing in the City Centre. I did not go near the City Centre during the pandemic as I had no reason to. I had seen reports on social media that …

Massive increase in cross border trade…

Brian O'Neill on July 19, 2022, 11:38 am

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While a border poll may be some years off yet, economic reunification seems to be going from strength to strength. From the Guardian report: Northern Ireland and Ireland are enjoying what appears to be a €4bn (£3.4bn) boost, with inter-country trade booming in both directions post Brexit, figures reveal. Official government data released in Dublin by the Central Statistics Office showed that imports from Northern Ireland to Ireland increased 23% to €1.9bn between January and May 2022 compared with the …

UK trade performance falls to worst level on record…

Brian O'Neill on July 1, 2022, 2:54 pm

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Close-up of dahlias using focus stacking. Ont their final days.

Like a mirage in the desert, the Brexit sunlit uplands are further away than ever. As the FT reports: The weak performance of UK exports and a surge in imports will add to pressure on the government over the damaging economic effects of Brexit as the official figures corroborate academic studies showing a rupture in UK exports since the new border controls were imposed in 2021. The data showed(opens a new window) that the UK’s current account deficit was 8.3 …

David McWilliams – ‘The truth is the union has been an economic calamity for Northern Ireland…’

Brian O'Neill on June 22, 2022, 1:52 pm

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Three Belfast landmarks in one shot. From left to right: Titanic Belfast, a museum for all things Titanic related; the very large Harland and Wolffe ship building crane Goliath; and immediately below it, the red bricked building where the Titanic was designed by Harland and Wolff prior to its fateful end in 1912 (May, 2019).

The Economist David McWilliams is married to a Presbyterian from Belfast, so his latest article for the Irish Times might get him a frosty reception at his next dinner with the in-laws. In the article, he outlines his view that partition has been a disaster for Northern Ireland. Take, for example, emigration which has always been a good indicator of economic frailty. Between 1841 and 1951, the population of what would become the Republic’s 26 counties fell by 55 per cent …

The untapped tourist potential of Tyrone…

Ciaran Ward on June 4, 2022, 7:57 am

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Ulster American Folk Park

Having recovered from being effectively a no-go area for tourists for the best part of three decades Northern Ireland now has much to offer the discerning visitor. Although I seem to be one of the few people on the planet who have never seen Game Of Thrones, the show seems to have worked wonders for the local tourist industry now that places like the Dark Hedges and the Giants Causeway have become popular must-see destinations. There are of course the …

Why I’m leaving Twitter fifteen years after I first jumped into an unending stream of news and tat…

Mick Fealty on June 1, 2022, 6:28 pm

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infinity, infinite, ecg

“You have to understand, most people are not ready to be unplugged…” -Morpheus, The Matrix I promised last week that I would explain why I’m leaving Twitter. Well, I’ve got my archives from them now so that I have a copy of everything I’ve shared with them over the years since 2007 and I’m ready to go. It’s not a case of personal frustration with the constant man playing. The mute and block functions that were invented do help you …

On the Protocol we need to put lesser problems into the background for ultimate solution at a later date…

Willie McCarter on May 23, 2022, 1:54 pm

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hand, sea, water

The world is in the most dangerous state it has been in since the Second World War. Many lives and livelihoods of ordinary people have been lost in the Ukraine due to naked aggression and democracies and democratic values are under severe threat all over the world. In times like these the rallying cry for all those across the world who treasure hard won democratic rights and values has to be the time honoured one of “All HANDS ON DECK”. …

Solution to protocol stand off could be an extension of grace periods and experimentation before local consent in 2024…

Terry Wright on May 20, 2022, 2:59 pm

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laptop, office, hand

One of many, Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD, has talked of a ‘landing zone.’ Fine Gael Senator Emer Currie has referred to there being a solution if we can find one, or words to that effect. Hardly a confidence builder? In Northern Ireland, recently elected MLAs, reflecting the intensity of politics in a small place, are digging themselves deeper into the rutted terrain of blame, counter blame and limited concession on ideological preferences. Arguing themselves into institutionalised confrontation. Reports from London and …