NAMA Business Plan

On percentage cashflow producing, IIRC the performance report indicates 19%. The plan 2.0 says first portfolio acquired is likely to have a higher proportion of investment loans.

Its the Baldrick “cunning” plan. Im surprised it doesnt mention turnips.

If you want to see what a proper business plan looks like then take a look at the guidance notes and datapack sent to developers by NAMA to produce their own developer business plans.

http://www.nama.ie/Publications/2010/NAMADebtorBusinessPlanRequirements.pdf

http://www.nama.ie/Publications/2010/NAMABusinessPlanDatapack.xls

What was published today is undeserving of the moniker “Business Plan” and NAMA know that (particularly Brendan McDonagh ACMA) . It’s an unsubstantiated range of predictions of NAMA NPVs together with some general information about NAMA – nothing you wouldn’t have known or guessed before. The document today contains less solid information than last October’s draft which was for “illustrative purposes” according to the NAMA CEO.

Of course as stakeholders in NAMA we (general public, academia, non-NAMA connected property industry) have quite a large appetite for information but we have a low importance to NAMA’s success. If you are unhappy with the information provided today then the EU (Mr Almunia, Competition Commissioner, who concluded in a letter published yesterday that Brian Lenihan had broken State-aid rules would be the appropriate contact) would be the best place to lodge your grievances.

I would like to think the best for the people who run NAMA but with €40-45bn of our money at stake, it is too much to leave to blind trust alone.

Greg

I’m doing an entry for my blog about this at the moment and here is what I was planning to say on this point:

The plan states that “Nama will pursue all debts owed by debtors to the greatest possible extent” on page 2, 7, 8 and 10. What is not very clear is that these debts only relate to the payments Nama makes to acquire the loans from the covered institutions and not to the nominal value of these loans.

In other words, Nama does not appear to be seeking payment of the haircut on these loans with the result that its debtors could be securing a bale out of up to €40 billion (based on a 50% discount).

This would appear to be confirmed by looking at the accounting treatment of the loans (€814 million nominal) from EBS and INBS taken into Nama’s balance sheet (at €371 million) during the first quarter of 2010 (see page 17 and accompanying note in Nama’s quarterly financial statements for period ended 31 March 2010).

If this is correct, Nama’s statements about chasing debts is misleading. Its huge “forgiveness” merely merits a footnote in the accounts.

Can someone help me with the figures in Table 4 of the revised business plan. Is it referring to the long-term economic value of the loan facilities themselves or to the underlying security (land/property) ?

Let’s say I wanted to set up a shop selling DVD players. If I went to my bank and produced a “business plan” that used the same level of financial detail as this NAMA plan, it would read something like this:
January Buy DVD Players €5 million
February- Dec Sell DVD Playes €7 million
Gross Profit €2 million
Conclusion: Sur’ it’ll be grand.

Seriously- don’t we deserve better?

@Brian Lucey,

“ok…but please tell me that we arent exposed on this. someone…?”

Sorry, Brian, but according to Savills we could potentially have a €1-3bn liability for unwinding these (if necessary)..

“Delegates at the company’s annual Financing Property presentation in London were told £120bn (€146bn) of UK commercial property needed to be refinanced between now and 2012, but that the aggregated cost of unwinding the swaps could be more than £10bn.

Borrowers use the swaps to hedge against the risk of rising interest rates.

William Newsom, UK head of valuation at Savills, estimated the cost of unwinding a five-year swap put in place in June 2007 as now being 11.7% of the size of the original loan.

This cost would rise to 20.4% for a 30-year swap.”

http://www.ipe.com/realestate/interest-rate-swaps-blocking-uk-disposal-pipeline-savills-says_35702.php?articlepage=1

(free registration required)

I’d like to qualify my comments above (9:05) by mentioning that the plan states that “debtors will continue to be liable to Nama for full loan balance recovery of €81 billion” and that the recoveries assumed in its NPV projections are “based on the amounts that would be recovered if NAMA foreclosed on debtors and underlying assets had to be realised by reference to the long-term economic value of the assets”.

This qualification sets the record straight but does not really change my contention that Nama’s “official” debts only relate to the payments it makes to acquire the loans from the covered institutions and not to the nominal value of these loans. In other words, Nama does not appear to be expecting payment of haircuts.

“If this is correct, Nama’s statements about chasing debts is misleading. Its huge “forgiveness” merely merits a footnote in the accounts.”

Agreed.

I never thought NAMA would pursue the developers.

As has been pointed out by Ahura (I think) before. NAMA need only recover its outlay and expenses to raise the flag and say “Mission Accomplished”.

They have no incentive (and every political disincentive you can think of) not to pursue the developers for the full amount.

Brian,

“ok…but please tell me that we arent exposed on this. someone…?”

Well excuse me for harping on about this for the last year.

If these derivative contracts are being transferred at nil because they are non-performing it means that we are on the hook for what is now a guaranteed loss.

The fact that they are “non-performing” does not mean that the counterparties don’t want settlement.

But hey, we got them for nothing.
!0% of €14bn would be … emm …emmm oh …€1.4Bn.

Excellent stuff.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a reply.

They know what they’re doing.

They don’t need the peasants getting uppity.

@ KW,

Either the information provided to the government by the banks last year prior to the passing of the NAMA bill was highly inaccurate (speculate yourself as to why this might have been) or the loan portfolio is deteriorating rapidly. It would be useful for NAMA to clarify the relative contributions of these two factors.

What we will never know is how much Fianna Fail led policies such as De-centralisation had an effect on the commercial land market around Ireland. De-centralisation and many of the state funded expansion programmes have been put on ice, and that has let the air clean out of the land value bubble. I mean, that infamous field outside Mulligar that everyone talks so much about – that was for real. There was rugby scrum kind of pressure to try and acquire those fields. And it wasn’t just the field outside Mulligar either. It was also the field outside the town outside of Mulligar, if you can get your head around that complex an equation. One of my occupations during the Celtic Tiger years was to travel around the midlands with a developer taking photographs of GAA football fields near towns. He would normally ‘duck’ in the drivers seat while we drove past, so that I could aim the camera out of his window and snap a shot. Later on e-mails and various conversations would take place with local football clubs. It was like a drive-by site acquisition strategy, and many folk were doing it. Someone actually paid me to do that! That was the extent of the productive capacity of some very well funded developers during the boom years. The best analogy I can think of, is a rock concert, where someone buys up the good seats using a credit card and adverstises somewhere, that you have the tickets to sell. That field outside the town outside Mulligar, was like the rock concert ticket. The Irish banks were the credit lines. Now all of the ticket purchasers have got left with the tickets, which was never part of the plan. Many of the purchasers of the field outside Mulligar would not know what a business plan is, if it hit them squarely between the eyes. There were naturally, a lot of genuine building and development companies, capable of carrying out work and adding value. But we need to apply the same investigation and same rigourous measures to land and property, as had to applied to rocket concert ticket sales in this country. Plain and simple. That is the only thing I needed clarified for good. BOH.

From RTE’s news headlines this evening:

Meanwhile, NAMA chairman Frank Daly said the plan confirmed that the five institutions covered by NAMA had not disclosed or had been unaware of the extent of the financial crisis afflicting their borrowers.

Financial crisis, afflicting their borrowers ? ? ?

If you have a bunch of ticket touts, and they don’t sell the tickets before their window runs out, they are wiped out, plain and simple. A very large chunk of NAMA borrowers had no intention of going to the rock concert, no interest in music and perhaps no even the price of one admission fare. Not to mind the two dozen they stuffed into their pockets with a view to passing on to some poor smuck, who was genuine. It is very easy to ascertain which was which in my opinion, having worked on both sides of the deal myself – and it has a whole lot of nothing to do with the ‘financial crisis’. C’mon Frank! BOH.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0706/banks.html

Perhaps now would be a good time to sell the Anglo deposits for 20bn?

AA has gone fierce quiet of late….I hope hes ok. I have visions of him in the basement of kildare st, with the lads with rubber hoses working on him to come up with some cunning economic rationale for NAMA, one that the bloggers here cant shoot in flames….

tull

20bn?

Why so cheap?

@al
“I hope that history wont be too harsh on A Ahern.
It must be soul destroying working with the Sr Humphreys and Malcolm Tuckers…”

Ok, lets parse this. My first question is : why would history not judge AA harshly if that is the fair and proper judgement of history? Let me preface this by saying that I think AA is a good guy, a solid economist (probably better than me), and a decent human being. However, he made a decision. That was to leave a lecturer post (not, as popular mythos has it, a chair) to go to be economic advisor to BL. In that context, he will and should be judged as harshly or not as the economic policy on which he advises.
Most commentators here give a passing grade, for good intentions and the right instincts, to BL (and thus interalia AA) on his macro policy. However, its clear that the banking policy is apocalyptically wrong. AA was a very prominent public defender of the policy last year. Ex officio his perspective carries significant weight. In so far as NAMA et seq is costing tens of billions more than it could and should have, in the face of unanimous advice from independent commentators that it was wrong wrong wrong, then anyone who defended it needs to be judged fairly. If that is a harsh judgement, so be it. AA has tied his reputation to NAMA.

Meanwhile, property prices continue to slide.

@ BL

“In retrospect I was wrong. Hindsight is 20-20. That is life. Does that invalidate the analyses I am doing now? Not necessarily. We will know for sure [about Nama] in 10-15 years.”
“This is not physics. It’s a social science. People are looking for more certainty that can be given.”
“I think we need to be cautious and humble.”

I wonder who said this and in what context.

Have I missed something? Did NAMA announce a multi-billion euro loss yesterday evening?

I didn’t realise we were supposed to judge NAMA a success or failure based on a few months of operations.

@BL

I think his point is that your post on Alan Ahearn was childish. Maybe he will be able to turn around in 10 years and slag you off. You didn’t exactly take criticism well about you talking up the sub prime mortgage market at the peak (Didn’t you claim that the Government and NAMA supporters were out to get you?).
I am sorry but you stopped being a serious commentator for alot people after your Anglo deposit book article and the fact that you failed to publically retract the article. And yet you laugh at people like Donal O’Mahony.

@ Gavin S,

I do share some of the same concerns that professor Lucey has expressed publically here at the Irish Economy blog. But allow me to explain where my concerns come from. Many of the ‘team’ around the NAMA effort at the moment are chosen from the best stock. It is like watching Brazil in the World Cup tournament. Then you have to watch as Brazil come up against some team who clearly doesn’t know how to play football, doesn’t care about football, and tries to get away with every trick in the book. Does Brazil try to persevere in playing sunshine, Samba football. Or should they know how to alter their game, to adjust to the opponents they are facing? Some would argue the former, more would argue for the latter. It is a clear question of judgement, as to which type of strategist you are.

For my own part, if I was a Brazilian coach (now there’s a big stretch of the imagination, even for me), and if I was getting the shins kitched clean off me on the field, I certainly would not persevere with Samba kinds of tactics. I take your point, we have only advanced a couple of months into the NAMA project, but even at after the first 10 minutes of game time, we have enough feedback already, to know if tactics aught to be changed or not. Failure to realise that, and persevere with something that isn’t working, could lead to a waste of the first half of playing time. And handing some of the initiate back to the opposition. Which means in the second half it will be a scramble to make adjustments and takes scores. Which hands further initiative back to the opposition, who will hope to break on the counter attack. We may have only advanced 5-10 minutes into the match time of NAMA. But that 5-10 minutes is now history. The first tranche has been paid for, and we are about to pay for the second. BOH.

@ Gavin S

Honohan, Dr Fitz, A Ahearne have all “made their choices” apparently…’you’re either with us or against us’ and all that is apparently the code of honour in some parts…how’d that work out for the guy who came up with that snappy line??

@Brian Lucey

I did google it and found nothing except stuff to do with the original article. I agree with you about the Sunday Independent. You should get them to print an apology if you didn’t say it. Makes you sound mad! Having said that, the original article was in the Irish Independent so I probably should have taken that into account when reading it also.

Probably the funniest article in the newspaper today.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/nama-chief-disturbed-as-bank-data-fails-to-stand-up-2248442.html

Seems like the chairman of NAMA bought crap from the banks with less due diligence than a doting old lady would buy insurance from a nice young door to door salesman.

I have an email from a ministers son in Nigeria who wants to send me 10 million if I can send him 50k. Sounds like a NAMA business opportunity.

My imaginary friend… You do recall that the Russian and I out out a Nama business plan in to the public domain last April? No?

@ BL

I agree with your statement that
Mr Ahern should be held accountable, have to justify the advice rendered.
But the point I am raising is if he is being listened to at all. Or for that matter, if the Minister can enforce his will either.
I suppose there is a book deal for him in the future after the election….

@Karl Whelan

You were cut off on Morning Ireland today when you started to question NAMA’s capacity to manage these loans. I wonder if you could expand on this.

I also have concerns about NAMA’s ability to process and manage these loans through the institutions. This situation could be exacerbated by an Anglo wind-down.

@ Zhou

I have always worried about NAMA’s ability to manage the loan portfolio given the relatively small amount of staff that they have.

My concerns about NTMA\NAMA’s competence in this area has been exacerbated by recent events such as:

1. The inability of those at NTMA\NAMA to get a handle on even a simple statistic like how many loans are being paid back. NTMA knew they were getting this job from April of last year. Over the summer, we heard repeatedly about the 300 pieces of information from each loan etc. There were repeated suggestions during September-October that the government knew a lot about the loan portfolio (e.g. “current estimates suggest LTVs of X, or income being generated by Y percent of the portfolio). Yet by October, when the bill was being passed, it is now clear that NAMA still had no idea of the true situation.

2. Mr. McDonagh’s claim in April — after the first tranche had been announced and largely paid for — that one third of the loans were generating cash. I said at the time that I didn’t believe this to be correct and indeed it’s not.

If these relatively simple matters cannot be dealt with, what is the hope that NAMA will manage this portfolio well on behalf of the taxpayer.

@Karl

I agree with your concerns but to be fair to NAMA, it sounds like the banks were at best incompetent or at worst complicit in hiding information with regard to loans. Therefore without NAMA and this information coming out, what situation would we have been in if we had left the banks to deal with the loans? I don’t think anyone thinks NAMA is perfect and I don’t think anyone takes pleasure in having to see it come into operation but it’s what we have.
All we can do is to try and make sure it operates in a way the minimises the risks to the taxpayer and that’s why debate and constructive criticism like this is useful and welcome. I emphasise ‘constructive’ though. I enjoy reading this site. Would be a shame to see the useful stuff get drowned out in a load of political point scoring.

For those interested (or curious), I have reviewed of Nama’s latest busines plan at

http://www.planware.org/briansblog/

It covers general issues about the plan and comments specifically on Nama’s commerciality, approach to debtors, accounting policy and creeping losses. I conclude that Nama’s strategy is to disclose as little as possible about future prospects and intentions but endless detail after the horse has bolted. This is no way to run an organisation that could end up costing taxpayers tens of billions and resembles the “in denial” strategies of the very same banks that it is meant to be rescuing.

@Gavin S:
“[…] to be fair to NAMA, it sounds like the banks were at best incompetent or at worst complicit in hiding information with regard to loans.”

The problem with NAMA, and with the government, is their failure to ask the simple question “Why is this lying bastard lying to me now?”

Just look at it as a matter of simple economics. The cost to a banker or developer of telling the truth (“We’re broke and all these developments are worth nothing”) is that all sorts of evilitude might happen. The cost to a banker or developer of telling porkies is nil. We therefore expect them to tell porkies: to pretend that their developments, and the loans related thereto, and the banks who made those loans, are all fine and dandy.

Now, NAMA probably can’t come out and tell the bankers and developers that they’re not to be trusted. But what it and the government could and should have done is to refrain from drawing up plans and budgets and making statements to the public unless it was absolutely certain that its assessments and assumptions and predictions were solidly based. All they have achieved is a further reduction in public trust — in state institutions as well as in bankers, developers and politicians.

Take nothing on trust; check everything.

bjg

@Karl,

I think the transfer was necessary for another reason. Whatever about the amount of loans that were not paying interest, the fact that the banks were not taking all steps available to them to protect their assets is equally as troublesome. Allowing rent to be removed from bank accounts of someone with non-performing loans is shocking. If I was a bank shareholder, I would be looking at that part of the report with interest.
I think if you had just done some accounting exercise to get the banks to reveal their loans, they would still have resisted to admit the whole story or manage the loans properly. It was only after the foreign banks started getting aggresive with court action that we saw the Irish banks make their move. If I have a choice of having the largest developers loans being managed by the Banks (to which the taxpayer is still exposed) or NAMA (despite its flaws), I know which I prefer.

A pre-requisite for loss-recognition is an agreed way of valuation.

Assets can be valued in many different ways and as far as I know any solution to that accounting problem is far off in the future.

Mark to market might make the banks insolvent now.
NPV on predictions of future cashflows is a lot of guesswork.

Will the new BASEL rules include guidelines/legislation/rules on how loans are to be valued?

@Jesper

Basel III does but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I have a document somewhere that shows their thinking with regard to loans. I will try and find it and link it.

I’d ignore my first post.

My point is that if 25% of the first tranche are cashflow producing, then we have to ask how representative is the first tranche to the whole portfolio. One key difference is – “It should be noted that investment property which constituted 52% of the first tranche is expected to make up about 30% of the final NAMA portfolio.” Now assuming investment property is property for commercial rent, then these are the type of loans most likely to generate cashflow. If the 25% hasn’t been adjusted for this, it’s likely the subsequent tranches will have lower percentages of cashflow producing loans.

Page 10 of this performance report http://www.nama.ie/Publications/2010/Section55QuarterlyReport31March2010.pdf shows that 19% of 1st tranche are ‘performing’. Though you need to consult the footnote on page 32 to see the unusual definition (which seems to base performance on the discounted purchase price with adjustments for changes to the property value post acquisition and principal repayments).

@ Gavin S, 1.40pm

There are arguments for an asset management approach and also arguments against.

Here’s an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand discussion from May 2009.

http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2009/05/10/do-we-really-need-a-nama/

for tull and his acolytes

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/5115721/Abbey-puts-offshore-Isle-of-Man-unit-on-market.html

as a forinstance. I have about six or seven more but for some reason they dont seem to be coming up on the blog

By that I mean selling deposit books that suddenly turn huge liabilities into huge assets for a bank

@ Brian “the deposit king” lucey

eh, you linked to that article as a joke, right? Keep ’em coming…

High number of variables in a formula is not a guarantee for its accuracy so some more information than that hundreds of variables (questions being asked) are being used should be made public.

Why aren’t the NAMA valuation criteria public?

Is there a suspicion that if they were made public, then the banks would try to game the valuations?

I’d rather risk the valuations being gamed than not knowing what the criteria are so that I have at least half a chance to figure out if I find them reasonable. That is my preference, others might have different.

Why not email and ask John? Or do you prefer anonymity?

So you say. email me…

John
No, its not. Heres the thing. I have explained, time an again, that sales of deposit books are possible. What can one get from them? Another question. More than zero anyhow. I have explained time and again that the anglo-philes assert without figures or consistency in those they give while the anglo-phobes put the analyses out there. Tull and his minions clearly have some sort of jones for me – which means im winning! So, no, i cant be bothered giving them more troll bait. anyhow im off on holidays tomorrow.
So, tull and all the rest reading from the FF “what to say when challenged on Anglo – Ch 3 : Dig up old stories and latch on like a rotter” playbook, if you are genuienly interested in the academics of this issue, email. If not, stop amending a new anglo version of Godwins law.
Later….

P.s. Enjoy your holiday.

@ Brian Lucey

is the key to selling a deposit book for a material amount of money some sort of third-secret-of-fatima type riddle that can only be discussed in private? Jesus man, stop digging, and stop ‘disappearing’ whenever people ask questions about it…

Btw, as regards your earlier contention, essentially, that the Sun-day Ind-ep-end-ent was full of shizzle, wasn’t it their sister paper the Ir-ish Ind-ep-end-ent that published your opinion piece about selling on deposit books for fantastical amounts of money? Was that the reason we shouldn’t have paid any attention to your nonsense back then? Unfortunately none of us on here have a newspaper opinion page as an outlet to tell people that you can’t sell a deposit book in the manner you have suggested, and thats probably the reason a lot of people “latch on like a rotter”. Ask the Indo for a spot to correct your error and all will be forgiven.

Ironically, a deposit taking franchise is extremely valuable if it can collect cheap and sticky deposits in an cost efficient manner either through branches or the internet and grow that deposit base steadily. But it must be able to deploy those deposits into higher yielding assets to yield a steady spread.
But Anglo had none of these features. The deposits taken in by Anglo were not cheap, not particularly sticky and as we now know earned no steady spread. So there was no annuity income that could be present valued that somebody would pay for.

It is the depsoti gathering institution that has the value not the deposits per se. I was merely trying to establish how you got to your numbers.

I was also disppointed at the the attitude towards Alan Aherne. The guy is a valuable resource to have in the DOF and I hope played a key part in improving NAMA from the original iteration where the govt and banks appeared ready to connive at 20% haircut to the current version of a 40-50% haircut. If you could only realise that the constant forensic analysis of KW and others all on this site has resulted in a better outcome for the taxpayer.

Anyway enjoy your holidays. Perhaps you would like to come along to the next Dail CC meeting.

@ Tull,

About as un-sticky as deposits can get, I should imagine. Good response. BOH.

While I still hope that he’s right and I’m wrong, my suspicions on the whole NAMA scheme and the way AA was describing it have not changed much since 2009…although the Independent’s editors added more commas than I would normally use.

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/nama-deal-is–a-pig-in-a-poke-1871890.html

Of course, the current process may mean that the facts of the case are identified sooner than I feared. Is it good that we know quickly that we’ve been totally screwed? Probably.

Why has AA not come out and publicly repudiated his statement about NAMA washing its face? What Lucey said was that he has gone awfully quiet. And he has.

@tull, one can only speculate the contribution AA has had if any in improving the legislation. MAybe it has been substantial, maybe it has been none. We can only make a judgement based on what is public and what is public is that he helped sell NAMA to the ordinary people by making statements that have since turned out to be flat out wrong i.e. “NAMA will wash its face.” KW’s forensic analysis has helped incredibly. But I have no evidence that AA did the same from the inside.

@Garo,

I have no desire to defend Alan Ahearne. He is a big boy and is alot smarter than me so can look after himself. How do you know that he is wrong about NAMA being able to wash it’s face? They announced Q1 results and haven’t even finished transferring all the loans. It’s way too early to make definite judgements on the eventual success or failure of NAMA even if the business plan didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

All people can do is speculate and that’s fine. You can criticise NAMA, figures, assumptions etc but leave the personal attacks out of it. Brian Lucey has written some crap in his time and yet still considers it appropriate to sneer at other people’s contributions. That’s what some of us have a problem with. Not healthy debate about facts and figures. As you say, there has been alot of useful forensic analysis and I don’t want to see it get drowned out by a people trying to settle personal scores. People can go onto politics.ie if they want to try and score political points.

@ Ahura

“target it in the right direction”

you’re quite right on that. And im pretty sure Brian Lenihan takes a lot of flak on these pages, amongst other outlets, from a wide array of people, and very often from Brian Lucey himself. Calling Prof Lucey out on his inaccuracies (im being kind) is only the other side of this debate. As i alluded to earlier, if you are given the opportunity to pen a wide variety of semi-regular opinion pieces/contributions in national newspapers and radio shows, there is a rather large onus on you to be correct in what you are saying. Adding in previous contributions in 2006 about ever rising house prices and sub prime lending, and there is a fair question out there about Prof Lucey’s underlying credibility in criticism aimed at both the banks and our government. Throwing in the critical comments on AA and you get a picture of someone who seems quite willing to throw out damnation on people for not calling things completely right, while completely forgetting about his own lack of foresight or knowledge at certain times. Humility wouldn’t go amiss here.

@ Tull,

Hasn’t the different skills of different economists a part to play here. At least from my observation of the Irish Economy blog – I know that Colm McCarthy has delved into competitiveness, perhaps because stimulus is so miserable an option for a small, open economy. Kevin O’Rourke has taken a view of world trade, over the centuries. Philip Lane looking at Macroeconomics. Some others have tried to explore issues with capital investment programmes. Karl Whelan hasn’t dared to venture too far into the EU macro-economic situation, though it pertains highly to the operation of NAMA. Brian Lucey has looked at all kinds of debt, in all levels of Irish society. Pat Honohan looking at governance and so on, in recently published report. Mr. Tol on all aspects of a new green economics. External bloggers, such as Ronan Lyons making contributions on property economics. I always find Constantin Gurdgiev’s look at taxation etc, of interest. You have Stephen Kinsella in Limerick taking a re-think about education of economics at third level, to include more debate/discussion. For a small country of its size, we are not doing so badly at all. I don’t know much about Peter Lunn’s work. We have also external commentators such as Stiglitz, Krugman, Johnson wrapped into the debate. Lets not leave out McWilliam’s contributions either, or those of former deputy Lee. The list is endless, I’m leaving lots of people out as it is. But the field of economics is trully vast. BOH.

Oliver,

What do you mean?

Pointing out your track record is not an attack. Anybody who prognosticates in a public forum is going to make mistakes. Chances are they willbe wrong about 50% of the time if they are any good.

For dozens read hundreds.

@Tull McAdoo
I’ll repeat this was a thread about NAMA not about Brian Lucey. The NAMA lobby saw their opportunity and made it about Lucey. I will accept that you were unwittingly used in this but used you were. I have seen it happen on hundreds of threads. The names used by the NAMA lobby commenters change but the tactics stay the same.

“Yor attitude that anybody who does not share your view is mendacious and in the pay of somebody else is arrogant in the extreme.” If you read my earlier post you will see that I too disagreed with unnecessarily personalised comments about Alan Aherne.
I’ll leave it at that.