Ireland is headed for a "creeping, short recession", a top economist has warned.
There are many indicators that the country is headed for a recession including runaway global inflation and interest rates increasing for the first time in 11 years. Finance guru Eddie Hobbs previously warned a "firestorm" recession in Autumn is "likely". The latest survey of Dublin's economy shows the rate of increase is in decline which could result in a "slow down" in the second half of the year.
And the European Central Bank raised interest rates by an unexpectedly high 0.5% last week which will make money more expensive to borrow. However, economist David McWilliams does not foresee our immediate economic outlook being "half as extreme" as the 2008 crash.
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He told a recent episode of the David McWilliams Podcast: "I don't think it is going to be anything as extreme as the case in 2008 and 2010 when there was mass, mass emigration of a whole blue collar class in Ireland." The Trinity College Professor explained that the country's finances are in a completely different place this time around.
He said: "Because in 2008, we experienced what is called in economics a 'balance sheet recession'. So what actually happened was because the balance sheet was so leveraged to property... that on the asset side of the balance sheet you had houses and on the liability side - this is the national balance sheet - you had debt.
"And once house prices started to fall by 10, 15, 20 percent and then by 50 percent, the asset side of people's balance sheet was down 50 percent but the debt side stayed the same and because interest rates were positive the debt side actually increased.
"The collective balance sheet of the country collapses which means that it takes ages and ages to get out of that because you basically have to wait for house prices to rise again."
"We are not looking at that now. What we are looking at now is much more akin to a short recession. Not particularly a shock but a creeping short recession.
"People always feel that there has to be a big shock to the economy for a recession to happen but what they don't appreciate is that economics, as we say at the very top of the show every week, is about human nature.
"Humans are a social, playful, gossipy animal and what tends to happen is that humans infect each other with confidence and infect each other with depression when it comes to the economic cycle.
"How this manifests itself is that prices fall very, very quickly, people increase their savings so the savings ratio of the country goes up, people temper their spending. If everybody in the economy is tempering their spending at the same time that causes the demand in the economy to crater and therefore you get what looks like a recession."
Prof McWilliams does believe we are headed for an economic downturn but said the country's key fiscal metrics, such as debt to Gross Domestic Product, are "not out of whack". This means a "soft recession" is much more likely, he said.
"As long as the key metrics are not out of whack we tend to get these soft recessions and I think that is what we are going into now," he said. "The first metric is debt to income ratios which we know as debt to GDP or GMP ratios."
"The basic rule of thumb is that if they are over 100 percent then your growth rate has to be higher than your real rate of interest... Our debt to GDP ratio is actually very low. People will find this very hard to believe because actual Government spending has been increased to about a hundred billion euros a year from about €80 billion before the pandemic."
The economist added that the country's books were in good shape because Irish people "have been paying down debt at a phenomenal rate" since the Celtic Tiger ended.
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