Friday, March 14, 2008

How Sound is the Irish Banking System

We don't want to be harbingers of doom but, if things are to go pear shaped, is it not better to be informed for potential evasive action?

A quick browse through Construct Ireland magazine (March/April '08 issue) brought us to a piece by Richard Douthwaite on the potential for disaster in the Irish banking system. It makes pretty chilling reading. I'm not going to re-invent the wheel by regurgitating it all here but, suffice to say, Irish banks are not in the finest of rude health considering the slide into which our property market has descended and their almost complete reliance on this sector for building their asset values and loan books.

The piece is not on-line yet but probably will be in the not too distant future at the Construct Ireland website. In the interim you might like to have a look at a brief overview on just how precarious a ledge the Irish banks now stand. It is only three pages long, is not written in Cyrillic like a lot of this stuff tends to be and is by Morgan Kelly, Professor of Economics at UCD, so it does bear some weight.

There is a link to the piece here. You'll need a PDF reader to read it which you can get for free from www.adobe.com if you haven't got one.

Interesting reading if nothing else and it might concentrate the mind if you've got a lot of money resting in an Irish bank account.

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