Showing posts with label ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ireland. Show all posts

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

You've been warned...

Many years have passed since the Economist identified a large, US-subprime style property boom in Australia.  A recent analysis by Leith van Onselen has drawn parallels with the disaster-prone Irish economy:

...Ireland’s house values have collapsed by 50%, on average, since 2007 and the island nation’s home owners have collectively lost the equivalent of A$315bn....Van Onselen notes that in 2004, Ireland was the ‘toast of Europe’, a country with a GDP per capita roughly 20% above the European average....“How things change… As is the case with most housing bubbles, Ireland’s was fuelled by a number of inter-related drivers: easy credit, speculation, and unresponsive supply.” ...
...“The risk for Australia is it basically hinges on the mining boom. If we had a big, big drop-off in mining, we could have a pretty big drastic adjustment. But it’s hard to say what the price adjustment would be if that happened. I couldn’t see Australia being anywhere near 50% [reduction in home values] but 20% could be possible.” (here)