Aidan Neill's Blog

Every Little Helps

Two weeks ago Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) announced the rarest kind of accounting mistake. As a consequence of some double counting of liabilities within the Housing Finance Agency the Irish government established that it was 3.6bn Euros better off than it previously believed that it was. Following the discovery of the error, Ireland’s [...]

Playing at Home

The often used phrase “sovereign debt-crisis” happily lumps the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) into the same collective boat, but each national crisis has its own characteristics that make the likelihood of default different from country to country. For Greece, fiscal adjustment is the key issue, as the government has been extravagantly fire-hosing [...]

Derived and Contrived

The current notional value of outstanding global financial derivative contracts stands at close to $600 trillion. That’s quite a figure; roughly ten times annual global GDP. Only 10% of these derivatives flow through regulated exchanges, with 90% traded “over-the-counter” on a bilateral basis between institutions. At the moment there is little reliable information on what [...]

Sharing is Caring

Amidst the staggering news flow of the past few weeks, Ireland’s debt crisis and its status in the Eurozone, has been relatively low on the international agenda, but potentially epoch making for Irish people. Ultimately, Ireland will have to default on some of its obligations – they have grown (and will continue to grow) to [...]

Where to park it?

Analysis: Last week saw high-yield bond yields drop below an average of 7% for the first time in six years, according to BofA Merrill Lynch data. On the face of it this is good news: low recent default rates should persuade lenders to dish out more loans to small businesses, while low costs of capital [...]

Dodgy Network

Analysis: Facebook has recently raised around $2bn in new funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors in a deal that values the social networking business at around $50bn. While the company recently reported being “free cashflow positive” (it makes money) for the first time, the valuation reflects a multiple of earnings that is likely to [...]

Winners are made not born

Analysis: An excessive focus on praising ‘innate’ talent in companies, organisations and society as a whole is both flawed and counterproductive. Winners are made, not born and talent is only cultivated through passion and hard work. I’m reading a book at the moment called “Bounce: How Champions are Made”. Not exactly autobiographical, but I’ve got a [...]

The Family Silver

In the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government embarked on its expansive privatisation program, Harold MacMillan, the then Labour leader, warned of the dangers of selling the “family silver”. Over the past twenty-five years dozens of formerly state owned assets – businesses and financial assets – have been sold into private hands. These range from [...]

Education Musings

The last few weeks of student protests in the UK and Ireland have been a microcosm of what we can expect over the coming years as “austerity measures” take hold. Undoubtedly, more interested parties will take to the streets to lay claim to a bigger slice of public expenditure than the next group. Lucky for [...]

Pass the Parcel

There is a British and Irish game regularly played at children’s parties, or at least it used to be before Nintendo Wii and Playstation came along, called “pass the parcel”. In this game the children sit in a circle passing a heavily wrapped parcel around while music plays in the background. When the music stops [...]