Opportunists preying on fear are the real vultures

This was a joint opinion piece by Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers and Ross Maguire of New Beginning. Ross is a Senior Counsel and a highly skilled professional in the area of property rights. The point being raised was that property rights and contractual obligations are very well set out in Irish law.

There are those that would have you believe that a person or company can buy your loan and suddenly turf you out, that simply isn’t the case and is factually incorrect. We refer to people sending out that kind of nonsense as being mandarins in the ‘Ministry of Fear’ and make the point that the facts matter.

The full article can be read here.

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The Morning Show: Distressed property auction

We were featured on TV3’s ‘The Morning Show with Sybil & Martin’ in a piece they did on the recent Allsops auction. Angela Keegan of MyHome.ie and Karl Deeter of our own company took part.

The general view we have is that if you mark down prices enough then people are willing to buy what they see as value, that means that either prices remain too high or sentiment is such that appetite is not there at the current price level (we suspect the former weighs heavier than the latter!).

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The credit crisis visualised

This is an interesting animated film on the origins of the crisis, it holds with the view that banks were only ever a part of the problem and not necessarily the sole cause. Central banks have a lot to answer for, as does all of society because when you stop saving and instead spend somebody else’s savings it means that eventually, when it comes time to repay your loans that not only is the money not there, but the productivity has likely suffered as well – income based on lending gives the artificial appearance of wealth but it is a mirage.

part 2

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The Fallout and the Bailout.

I feel like I keep repeating myself, the crisis is related to property and leverage. Unlike the tech bubble the issues caused by property and leverage affect the financial systems much more than technology did. The degree of leverage in the system is astounding, much of the whole wealth of the world is currently ‘borrowed’ and that’s a very scary thing, at least for me when I dwell on it.

Some institutions are leveraged differently than others but in general commercial banks are leveraged at 10 to 1 so for every dollar they actually own they owe 10. Savings institutions are about 8.4 to 1 and credit unions are the same. Brokerage firms and hedge-funds are at 32 to 1. Be afraid, that means for every Euro or Dollar they have they owe thirty two! Is there any lender out there that would give you thirty two times earnings? If you average out all institutions you come out with an over all leverage of about 12 to 1.

But stop right there… this doesn’t include derivatives! and they are not …

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