RTE ‘Frontline’ with Pat Kenny: NAMA for the little people?

RTE Frontline 12th April 2010 – NAMA for the little person? from Irish Mortgage Brokers on Vimeo.

Irish Mortgage Brokers was featured on RTE’s ‘Frontline’ with Pat Kenny on Monday the 12th of April 2010. The topic of the day was about bailouts for home owners who are in trouble with their mortgages.

Noleen Blackwell of Free Legal Advice Centre was there on behalf of favouring methods to save home owners, and Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers was there promoting the use of market mechanisms as a solution, along with arguing the case that for many people, bank ownership of their home is not necessarily a bad thing.

This is a hot topic in Ireland, in particular because many people feel, that taxpayers stepped up to save our banks, so now they should do the same in return.

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Talking NAMA, how much is a billion?

While we are all hearing about ‘a billion this’ and a ‘billion that’ for various financial institutions I would hope that we don’t lose sight of what a ‘billion’ actually is.

A billion seconds ago it was 1959 A billion minutes ago you could have spoken to Jesus… In person A billion hours ago our ancestors in the stone age were eating raw meat and dying regularly of things like the common cold. A billion days ago we were not bipedal.

So a billion is a big number, its a one with twelve zeros after it

€1,000,000,000,000

If you earned the minimum wage of €8.65 it would take you over 13 million years of non stop work, day and night, seven days a week to earn a billion euro (pre tax).

We are getting shafted, it doesn’t feel good.

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