The Financial Regulator regularly does ‘cost surveys’ to help the Irish public determine what the best deals are on the market, it would seem that in some cases they are actually driving people directly to certain insurers because they don’t survey the whole market! Indeed, as this weeks Sunday Times article by Niall Brady shows, Brokers were able to beat the ‘best price’ quoted by the regulator in almost every example, and it wasn’t only by a few cent either! In one case it was about €500 per annum, and in many others it was €100 p.a. – now on the other hand, if a broker went and made a person pay that much more than they had to then they’d be lynched, but when the regulator does it’s just an ‘oversight’… Quis costodiet ipsos custodes? Click on the picture below if you want to see a larger more readable version of it.
The bailout has arrived, Irish banks in line for Government funds.
The banking bailout has come along, as many of us always thought it would, in the form of a (potential) €10 billion Euro package. An announcement was made yesterday and shares in financial institutions surged on the back of the news. The actual details of the deal are scant at present.
The Minister of Finance remarked on RTE radio that the main thing he hoped to see as a result of this was for lending to return to the market, we can only assume this refers to enterprise lending and not to mortgages as the mortgage market has not frozen to the same degree the business loan/credit area has.
The National Pension Fund Reserve is the area the funds will come from, an obvious issue here is that the fund made losses of c. 33% in the last year and cashing out now will mean those losses are crystallised without hope of return should the markets come back any time soon. …