From kathleen barrington: 29 August 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
John – not his real name – is a 31-yearold chartered accountant who trained with a Big Four accountancy firm. He has just returned from two years in Australia and is working as finance director of a multinational firm in Dublin. His fianceé is also a [...]

From kathleen barrington: 22 August 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
In January of this year, leading fund manager Jeremy Grantham warned his investor clients to ‘‘beware the financial industrial complex’’. It was an extraordinary warning coming from a man, who as chairman of Boston based GMO, manages more than $94 billion in client assets.Writing in his quarterly letter [...]

From kathleen barrington: 15 August 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Now that the banks are pushing up variable mortgage rates for borrowers, it is time to ask yet again why our government has persistently failed to encourage long-term fixed-rate mortgages which might have protected borrowers from the impact of rising rates.The price hikes being imposed on [...]

From kathleen barrington: 08 August 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard University is a fascinating character. She is currently head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, which oversees the US Treasury’s spending of the $700 billion committed to bailing out troubled banks in 2008.However, she is in the news at the moment because [...]

From kathleen barrington: 01 August 2010 By Kathleen Barrington
It was a widely accepted tenet of the boom years that social partnership had brought a level of industrial peace that allowed the economy to thrive.But with the economy now in freefall, the consensus on which social partnership rested has been falling apart.Many in the business [...]

From kathleen barrington: 25 July 2010
By Kathleen Barringtom
Imagine if a public health doctor visited your local school and said he found your children were displaying a set of symptoms generally regarded as predictors of a very serious illness or even death within three years, what would you do?Would you whisk your children down [...]

From kathleen barrington: 04 July 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
It is just a year since the Financial Services Authority in Britain announced it was set to ban commission-based financial advice in a move that was seen as sounding the death-knell for the old style financial adviser industry.There has since been no sign that the FSA is [...]

From kathleen barrington: 27 June 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
The President of the Irish League of Credit Unions is heading to the World Council of Credit Unions conference in Las Vegas next month. Mark Bailey, and the five other league officials who will accompany him on the trip, wouldn’t dream of betting credit union funds on the [...]

From kathleen barrington: 20 June 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Financier George Soros gave an interesting speech earlier this month in which he offered advice on the lessons to be learned from the global financial crisis.Many of these will resonate with observers of the Irish banking crash.The man who famously broke the Bank of England earning an estimated [...]

From kathleen barrington: 13 June 2010
By Kathleen Barrington
Just before the general election of May 2007, the then finance minister Brian Cowen rushed through legislation which enabled mortgage lenders to raise even more funds on international markets to fuel their reckless lending spree.In February 2007,Cowen published legislation which he then said ‘‘helps provide a [...]