At the Central Bank conference on distressed property markets yesterday there was an excellent line up of speakers, the event was launched by the Governor who said that ‘Household financial distress is at unprecedented levels in Ireland as can be seen, for example, from the extraordinary rates of arrears on the servicing even of mortgages secured on owner-occupied homes‘.
That line is the one that made headlines, it was designed (intentionally or not) to make a point which various regulators keep making – that banks are not dealing with this problem.
So all we get from this is that mortgage arrears have miraculously gone to ‘extraordinary levels’ somehow and somebody needs to fix that… The justified rage being that we pre-capitalized the banks (recapitalizing would have necessitated the capital being used first not held to the bitter end) to the tune of €64bn.
Matthew Elderfield said it in March of last year, ‘time to face up to reality’. This was echoed in a talk given to the …