We were speaking with Sean O’Rourke about mortgage rates, that they were falling as part of a trend and that new moves to force them down would likely not work. It came on the back of a piece by Conor Pope in the Irish Times that quoted us in the article entitled ‘New bank levy could see mortgage rates rise not fall‘.
Wages ‘should’ rise, but why and how?
Ged Nash recently said that ‘wages should rise‘ as a way to give some relief to hard pressed middle income earners. This is an unusual stance given that Mr. Nash is a financially unaffected third party to this and has no idea of the situation many companies are in which more about a state of tight cashflow management and deleveraging.
Why should wages rise? With unemployment still elevated at well over 11% there is still enough excess capacity in the labour market to ensure wages don’t rise except for in industries with a constrained supply of workers or a skills gap, such as IT is experiencing at present.
Other than that, wages are unlikely to naturally rise because you can replace a worker for today’s market clearing prices (current wage), although that doesn’t always happen as people are not widgets, but the general thesis holds. If placed between two propositions of workers with similar skills you can opt to take on an extra person on a ten person …
Vincent Browne and Joan Burton go at it on TV3
we put the two clips together to show what you may have seen if TV3 had been able to ‘play back the tape’.