"Ireland will beat recession", "Rapid growth... as early as next year" - Cowen

[Dios]

2006? I don't think the world economy has shrunk that far back in time.

2006 is seen as the peak of the boom in Ireland, which was usually about a year behind the US, so its a pretty safe high tide mark as far as we're concerned.

The deficit situation is a different story to GDP.

Surely these two issues are highly interconnected?

[Dios]

Yeah, I overstated that one. Good call, must work on my stats primer! But the greying of the EU, and our advantage on that score is real enough. The average age IS significantly higher outside of Ireland.

How much of that is due to the half million odd migrants that landed in recent years, who won't be sticking around? Never mind the emigration issues...

[Amuppet]

Good to know that BIFFO says good times are ahead. I'm so optimistic the future is so bright that I'll have to start wearing shades.

I believe in this fellow, too:

Santa Claus' Village on the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi in Lapland in Finland

[/etc]

the most important task on hand is to restore credibility with investors. without them, bankruptcy is a certainty before the recession ends.

hopefully, they will consider the speech is just another dreaming-out-loud from our dear leader. if they believe our leader actually believe what he said, they will no doubt stop buying our debt papers - the possibility of default becomes a certainty when a country is being led by an insane leader.

we are not merely talking about going through a few years of pain. we are talking about survival here Mr. Cowen. Wake the f*&k up!

[jpc]

Quote:
Ireland will beat the global recession and is already making “real progress”, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said tonight.

“I understand that and I want to explain to you tonight that we are making real progress, and that we have a way out that is working,” Mr Cowen said.

Years ago in anther election.
Someone made equally desperate statements.
When asked after the elections how he could have stood up and made those statements.
The reply without the faintest flicker of embarassment was.

"Those statements were made in the white heat of an election campaign."

So now you know why he feels he can talk such demented tripe.

[feargach]

Hmm. Assuming things pick up internationally to 2006 levels by January 2011, we'll have approximately the same FDI based employment as during that year.

That doesn't follow at all.

International trade levels do not exclusively determine Irish living costs, and hence minimum wage demands.

It is perfectly possible to have much more FDI based employment in your scenario than in 2006.

If living costs in 2006 are cheaper, and employers are not competing with a bloated bubble construction sector for workers, it´s entirely possible for far more people to be employed in 2011 as a result of FDI than there were in 2006.

The high cost-base of 2006 will not return, so employment costs to foreign firms will fall, and competitiveness will rise.

[YoungLiberal]

That will be the least of our worries, trust me.

Eh, what will worry us more than a massive depression?

[feargach]

We also have a lot of commercial space and office space (too much ). The govt should drive down these rents by putting pressure on banks and landlords to reduce these commercial rents. This will help service sector exports.

I think it is almost inevitable the economy will grow by the end of 2010. However we need some good policies for us to have long term sustainable growth.

Yeah, people have switched from irrational exuberance to irrational pessimism without once looking closely at the sums and seeing what the bond investors see: the sums favour a real recovery for Ireland, albeit far below the Celtic tiger excess years.

[Proposition Joe]

Yeah, I overstated that one. Good call, must work on my stats primer! But the greying of the EU, and our advantage on that score is real enough. The average age IS significantly higher outside of Ireland. The current median age in the EU is 37.7, but by 2028 the average age of an EU citizen will be 52.3.

The median age is expected to go over 50 by 2050, and that is consistent with an average age of 65, certainly if births per woman keep going on their current trend, and people keep living longer.

Are you relying on some universal law of statistics that requires the average to exceed the median for all distributions?

The mean is typically higher than the median only in positively skewed distributions, for example income. In this case, a small number of extreme outliers on the up-side (say Brendan Drumm and Pat Kenny) tend to skew the average upwards, without impacting on the median.

However the average is is typically lower than the median in negatively skewed distributions. Age tends to fall into to this category as there's a hard upper bound on human longevity.

Which is to say, there's not much scope for extreme outliers hitting age 250 years, whereas there's plenty of scope for medical consultants on 240k to skew average income.

So I'd be careful about making assumptions that a particular median age "is consistent with" an even higher average age.

A couple of other points on your theory of demographics:

1. You fail to take account of the potential for policy changes within countries with graying populations, to rectify the situation via heavy inventivizing of fertility (as is done in France) or by encouraging inward migration (as is done in the UK).

2. You also fail to take account of the negative impact that the demographic issues in our European neighbours will have on our own economy, by depressing demand in our trading partners and also requiring that our net contribution to the EU budget goes up.

[Marlowe]

I just heard the end of a panel discussion on RTE this morning.They ridiculed what Cowen had to say.The spin is getting farcical at this stage.