Gorey Co. Wexford - The traffic hell hole of the east!!

Sweet jebus have you ever been unfortunate enough and had to drive through the J Walking Hell Hole of a Kip called Gorey? What a complete disaster in modern day communting / transport, you are guaranteed to spent at least 25 minutes of your life sitting in a traffic jam when going through this dump. But wait ... relief is on the way Wexford Co. Council are on the ball and are planning a bypass.

The construction of dual carriageway will replace the existing N11 between Clogh and the Arklow bypass and includes a bypass of Gorey Town (about f'ing time!!). However it's not scheduled for completion until Q4, 2007.

2007!!!
.

You have got to be taking the piss. Even if they get it completed in 2 years time the bottleneck will just move down to Camolin or Ferns. You have honestly got to wonder what those toss pots in the National Roads Authority (NRA), County Council and our beloved Government use to plan ahead a frigging black stick and lazy labrador. It gets even better by 2015 the government still isn't planning on bypassing some of these towns, check out the national road network in 2015. Take your Transport 21 and stick it up your hole Bertie. The biggest economic boom this country has ever witnessed and low and behold Fianna Fail are still squandering money, at least with Charlie Haughey we eventually knew where the money was going i.e. into his own pockets!!

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TIME: The Best Photos of the Year

Click here to view and vote

Statistics speak for themselves

Beaten semi-finalists in the Champions League four years ago United have since slipped further and further away with each progressive season. Beaten in the quarter-finals in 2003, they failed to get beyond the first knock-out round in 2004 and 2005. This year they finished bottom of arguably the weakest of the eight qualifying groups. Last season they finished without a trophy of any description.

HAPPY DAYS INDEED!!

Mini PC

Mini Mac-like PC which runs Windows Media Center with an Intel Celeron M 360, 512MB of memory, DVD/CD-RW combo and a 40GB hard drive for £499. Another model offers an Intel Pentium M 760 and an 80GB drive for £699. The manufacturer is AOpen of Taiwan, which showed the system earlier this year at at the Computex Taipei exhibition

North Atlantic's natural heating system has slowed by about 30%

The Atlantic Conveyor, a life-giving ocean current that keeps northern Europe warm, is slowing down, scientists said on Wednesday. If the 30 percent slowdown seen over the past 12 years is not just a blip, temperatures in northern Europe could drop significantly, despite global warming, they added.

Scientists have long forecast that the Atlantic Conveyor that carries warm surface water north and cold deep water back to the equator could break down because of global warming. This is the first time we have observed a change in the current on a human timescale," oceanographer Harry Bryden said, noting that it had completely shut down during the ice ages. Read On

Property in Russia

Click here for Real Estate Quarterly from Russia this PDF contains

• Russian commercial property market surveys
• Analysis of market trends and forecasts
• Investments in real estate
• Coverage of main real estate and construction news and events
• Lists of reliable real estate service providers and construction companies

It also contains info on fast growing Kazakhstan I wonder if it mentions anything about Borat's house?

Maybe interest rates won't continue rising through next year?

Bloomberg News - ECB President Jean- Claude Trichet said an increase in interest rates as early as next month may not be the first of many

FT - Slowdown in consumer spending in France and Germany

The poll is closed!!

Click here for the video clip!!

Note: This clip might take a minute or two to download depending on your internet connection. If you don't have a broadband connection try using google video the quality isn't as good as the first link.

The poll result is available here if ya wanna see more, then let me know...

ECB to raise interest rates? Will it be in December or January?!?

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- European Central Bank (ECB) council member Klaus Liebscher said inflation is a growing danger and the bank "can always bite," the clearest hint to date that an increase in interest rates may come as early as Dec 1st

Property Snippets

West Cork: 3/4 of an arce with planning permission for just €38,000

Planning permission for a 4 bed dormer 2 storey house. Property has complete privacy with a high fushia hedge bounding 3 sides. There are panoramic countryside an mountain views from the site. Doh! Sale agreed (not surprisingly!!)

West Cork: "56 Acre" Site With Outline Planning Permission for just €100,000

Very nice providing you are "local"

Australia: €186,000 for an investment property in 'Noosa Heads'

Central Bank Ireland: Assessing Interest-Rate Risk

Any increase in interest rates will have implications for the Irish economy, and more specifically for the stability and soundness of the Irish financial system.

Ouch!! The report goes on to say...

Over the medium-term horizon (three to seven years approx), however it is likely that the euro area economy will revive and will see a much higher equilibrium real rate of interest. A steady state growth rate of 3 per cent, combined with an inflation rate of about 2 per cent (consistent with the ECB’s inflation objective) and a risk premium of 1 per cent would add up to an equilibrium mortgage rate of approximately 6 per cent. With the typical variable mortgage rate of interest being around 3 per cent now (October 2005), an increase in interest rates to this putative equilibrium level would double the repayments burden. For highly indebted borrowers, this would be an intolerable burden and would almost certainly mean a sharp increase in the ratio of non-performing loans. The full report is available online here

BBC News: Virtual property market booming

Bless what will be next? A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that exists only in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. Click here for more

Main Macroeconomic Shocks affecting Major Economies since 1973

More from the Central Bank Ireland. According to the CBI over the last four decades, the volatility of output growth in six of the G-7 industrialised economies has fallen significantly. However, over the last four decades guess the one commodity that effected the output growth?


See page 4 of the report

Robert Shiller: "Our experience with home prices is that they slow down, stabilise and then fall."

Who is Robert Shiller? Well he once famously predicted the stock market crash of 2000. He's a Professor of Economics Yale University and has drawn parallels between the irrational exuberance of the stock market in the late 1990s and the boom in international property prices in recent years.

“The high valuation that the stock market attained at its peak in 2000, and the relatively high valuations that it still shows today, came about for no good reason,” he writes. “The high valuations that the prices of homes attain in many markets are coming about for no better reason.”

Shiller has produced an index of US home prices from 1890 to 2004. His amazing finding is that real home prices were only 66 per cent higher in 2004 compared with 1890.Thatworks out at a singularly unimpressive return of 0.4 per cent per year.

Shiller finds that pretty much all of the increase occurred in two periods: immediately after World War II and from 1998 onwards, immediately after the stock market boom. Click here for more

OECD believes Irish property market overvalued by 15%

Senior officials from the OECD and the Central Bank recently accepted that the Irish property market is overvalued by 15 per cent, according to a confidential account of their meeting produced by the Paris-based body. Central Bank officials, however, were reluctant to disclose such a figure in case it might destabilise the Irish property market.

At a meeting of senior officials from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Central Bank on the subject of the property market, Irish officials were informed of OECD research which suggests that Irish prices were 15 per cent overvalued. Click here for more

Permanent tsb/ESRI House Price Index

According to the latest edition of the permanent tsb/ESRI House Price Index the price of houses for First Time Buyers rose by 9.4% over the first nine months of this year compared to an increase of just 4.8% for second time buyers. The 'monthly standardised price' table is available here this dates back to 1996 when a 3 bed semi would set you back €69,350 compared to €263,715 in 2005. The average price paid for a house by a First Time Buyer is now just short of a quarter of a million euro – some €242,172.

What do all of these have in common?

Still not sure? Have a read of the articles below then make your own decision

Articles:
National Geographic
Time Magazine
MSNBC
Newsweek
New York Times
The Guardian
Wall Street Journal
Petroleum Review
Financial Times

ODAC: Publicly quoted oil companies all produced less crude

The top 22 publicly quoted oil companies all produced less crude and NGLs [Natural Gas Liquids] than they did in 2004," according to a report published in the October issue of Petroleum Review. Compared with 2003, ten companies produced less in the first half of this year. Nine companies produced less than in 2002. "Clearly, it is no exaggeration to say that the world's largest oil companies are now really struggling to hold production levels," the report says. Meanwhile, a recent study by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie shows that only a quarter of the 28 leading oil companies active in international exploration have fully replaced their production through new field discoveries. The group of companies studied represents more than 30 percent of total world oil supply. "Not only is exploration more expensive now, but it has become more difficult to achieve success, as the more accessible fields have been discovered," the study author Andrew Latham said, noting that the industry has not discovered any new "world-class" fields since 2000.

Taken from Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC)

DMcW: Banks are drowning us in debt

This Tuesday, the Central Bank (ireland) will publish what is probably its most important report this year. The bank will unveil its financial stability report on Irish banks. It will assess whether the banks have been prudent in their lending over the course of the past year and whether there is any evidence of risk to the system.

In a former life, I used to write economic reports for the Central Bank, so am reasonably well placed to give you an idea of what it will say. To get an idea of what the read will be like, imagine you are listening to a theatrical prosecuting barrister outlining a long list of offences he alleges were committed by the defendant, ‘Mr Banks'.

“M'lud, in front of me is this snivelling piece of financial delinquency, who has been engaged in practices so heinous, so depraved, so despicable that he threatens the integrity of the entire system. His profligacy knows no bounds; his self-serving greed is so transparent as to suggest that he is beyond redemption.”

Full article is available from here

The Economist: Worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history

Never before have real house prices risen so fast, for so long, in so many countries. Property markets have been frothing from America, Britain and Australia to France, Spain and China. Rising property prices helped to prop up the world economy after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. What if the housing boom now turns to bust?

According to estimates by The Economist, the total value of residential property in developed economies rose by more than $30 trillion over the past five years, to over $70 trillion, an increase equivalent to 100% of those countries' combined GDPs. Not only does this dwarf any previous house-price boom, it is larger than the global stockmarket bubble in the late 1990s (an increase over five years of 80% of GDP) or America's stockmarket bubble in the late 1920s (55% of GDP). In other words, it looks like the biggest bubble in history. Click here for more

Guardian: The pressure mounts

North Sea oil production in all offshore fields is 30% down on 1999 and dropping daily. North Sea oil production has 'peaked' and is now declining. The same will happen soon to global supplies. John Vidal and Ian Sample examine the potential consequences of a worldwide shortage of fossil fuels. Click here for more details.

Time Online: Waiting for the lights to go out

We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard

The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.

It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.

Full article is available here

Times Online: Coldest winter for decade could spark energy crisis

The Times October 10, 2005

The British Government has summoned industrialists and generating companies to an emergency meeting next month amid fears of an energy crisis if Britain suffers a harsh winter.

Paul Simons, The Times weatherman, said that the shift in temperature was influenced by a phenomonon known as North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO, influenced by a lowpressure system over Iceland and high pressure over the warm Azores islands in the sub-tropical Atlantic. When the Icelandic pressure rises and the Azores pressure dips, Britain catches blasts of bitterly cold air.

He said: “In the 1940s the NAO turned negative and brought some of the coldest European winters of the 20th century, including the bitter freezes that helped to defeat Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Another bout of negative NAOs in the 1960s included the worst winter for more than 200 years, when homes were buried under snow and ice floes drifted in the English Channel.

“The Met Office is forecasting a negative NAO this winter. Although they cannot tell how severe the weather will be, the past ten winters had such ridiculously mild weather that even an average British winter will come as a rude shock.”

See here for more details