The Euro is a credible currency

Quantitative Easing (which used to be called deficit monetization) is justified – in this clip – by ECB president Jean Claude Trichet. Monetary policy works…. eventually, and when it does it tends to result in high levels of inflation.

Some people said the Euro wouldn’t last a decade, for our part, we hope that they are proven to be wrong, the will of society is a very powerful incentive and can be the difference between what should happen in theory and what actually occurs, for that reason I think the Euro will pull through but there will need to be some serious changes made in the way that the Eurozone manages itself.

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Irish Mortgage Brokers in the press, May 2010

We had a busy month in the financial commentary world. A list of our press mentions is below

23rd May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Safe for a while against rate hikes

23rd May 2010: Sunday Times: A bad time to invest? Q & A with Jill Kerby

23rd May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Mortgage rate increases

16th May 2010: Sunday Times: Keep hold of your home

16th May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Mortgage group mull over Negative Equity Loans

16th May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Recession Rates

14th May 2010: Newstalk 106: Ivan Yates talks to Karl Deeter about Property Prices

15th May 2010: Independent: Property prices must fall to attract investors

13th …

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Tony Brabazon: Biologically inspired Algorithms

Tony Brabazon talks to CFA Ireland on Biological Algorithms from CFA Ireland on Vimeo.

Tony Brabazon spoke to CFA Ireland about Biological Algorithms and using patterns or approaches found in nature as a foundation for solving issues in other fields. This is a fascinating talk by a highly skilled and knowledgeable academic who is based in UCD.

You can find out more about CFA Ireland here: http://www.cfaireland.ie/default.aspx

CFA Ireland welcome new members and if you’d like to be part of what is considered one of the most professional and respected financial charters worldwide you can find out more here: http://www.cfaireland.ie/member/default.aspx

The video was shot by Karl Deeter with kind permission of CFA Ireland

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Moving paper or ‘selling your mortgage’.

In the USA and Canada they sometimes refer to a process of ‘moving paper’ which is where a person sells their mortgage – the actual debt and all the conditions that go with it. That might sound kind of pointless but it would certainly be a valuable option in Ireland and could perhaps offer (if it existed: it doesn’t) a selling advantage of debt holders over non-debt holders in selling a property.

Take an example of a person selling a house for €200,000 if they were able to offer their current mortgage of ECB+1% to the prospective buyer then it might be an attractive proposition! In particular, the bank might benefit because even if the person was in negative equity it might be worthwhile to buy such a debt product at a premium.

People don’t think about buying or selling mortgages (institutions do it all the time), and yet we readily consider buying and selling debt (which is what the bond market is). Why can’t we do the same for the individual …

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5 keys to the market, stock indicators to watch

Todd Harrison of Minyanvill.com talks to Yahoo!’s tech-ticker team about the five signals he sees as being those that fundamentally move the market.

1.Treasury yields: The 10-year yield settled at 3.50% on Friday, down from its recent rise to 3.78% on June 19, but still well above the January lows around 2.7%. Whether traders view this rise as a sign of “normalization” or incipient inflation will help determine the market’s fate, Harrison says.

2.Inflation vs. Deflation: Even Alan Greenspan knows the Fed faces a major challenge of needing to rein in excess liquidity before inflation takes hold, but not too soon as to risk choking off the recovery. Inflation is clearly a long-term threat, but Harrison says there’s 75% odds deflation persists for the near-term. (great piece on this by Morgan Stanley here)

3. New Supply of Stock: UBS’s $3.5 billion stock sale Friday is just the latest in a series of secondary offerings from banks. Some are worried about the pure supply and demand issues, but Harrison is …

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Financial Fragility and Corporate Governance in Ireland today

This is footage of a talk given by Prof. Stephen Kinsella of the Kemmy Business School in University of Limerick, about his thoughts on regulation, corporate governance, and the Minsky Hypothesis.

You can watch the whole playlist here. Or go to the Irish CFA channel on youtube and check out the follow on videos, there are six in total, the questions and answer section is particularly interesting to anybody who may have an interest in financial regulation and some of the pitfalls of it, Stephens thoughts are quite refreshing to the normal solutions you’ll hear (although I don’t agree with them all!).

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Ludwig von Mises, Economist, Libertarian.

What kind of man was Ludwig von Mises? As this unique film shows, Mises (1881-1973) was a man who never stopped fighting for freedom: not when the Nazis burned his books, not when the Left blackballed him at universities, not when it seemed as if statism had won. With courage and genius, he fought big government until the day he died in 25 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 60 years of teaching.

Mises’s battles against Communists, Nazis, and other socialists, are featured in this film, as are his ideas of Liberty. There is also the old Vienna he loved, the Bolshevik prime minister he dissuaded from Communism, and a cast of villains from Lenin to Hitler, as well as such supporters and students as Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Bettina Greaves, M. Stanton Evans, Mary Peterson, Joseph Sobran, and Yuri Maltsev.

Among his many accomplishments, Mises showed that socialism had to fail, that central banking causes recessions and depressions, that the gold standard is honest money, and that only laissez-faire capitalism is fully compatible with Western civilization.

Mises …

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