"this ridiculous NAMA plan"

[Rossfan]

We( the taxpayers) in effect buy €47,000,000,000 worth of property for €55,000,000,000 at a time when property prices are still  falling to reach the proper level for the emptiest Country in Western Europe.
The people who might be buying houses in the future are being told by IBEC/Bankers/FF that they have to be paid less.("We" need to stop paying ourselves so high...they tell us. Yet only the self employed,Company Directors and TDs actually can pay themselves.  ).
Surely the only outcome then can be that house prices have to drop to a level where people can truly afford to buy them before there is a "proprty market" again.
So we the taxpayers have paid the baks €55bn of borrowed money for property that we will sell for maybe €30bn.
Be afraid ...............be very afraid.

With one of the fastest growing populations . These people will need to live some where .

Can't see it being the fastest growing any longer. Anyway if these people are all on the Dole they won't be able to buy houses no matter what the price.

[muppet]

""Soviet Irish Bank"'

Typcial  Fianna  Failer

That's how it will be viewed in America and on wall street

America would have had jailed some of our bankers by now and remember they let Lehmans fail along with nearly 90 others this year. That is what a free market is supposed to be.

Our version is that in good times they get rich and in the bad times the taxpayer bails them out. Some free market.

[fearbrags]

That's how it will be viewed in America and on wall street

Says  who    You  and King Bertie

Or  was  it  Bernie made-off  with  all the  money

[Zapatista]

The main difference between NAMA and Good/Bad bank is that NAMA gets control of the assets. NAMA gets to repossess without actually reposessing. It is a FF quango which allows FF to appoint their own people to repossess assets and hold them untill they are valuable and return them to their own people ahead of the market. Good/Bad bank would be run like a Bank with bankers running along banking rules and regulations. NAMA can do what it likes.


Can you imagine when/if the time comes that the property market starts to increase in value. This FF quango will be one of the most powerful bodies in the country. It will be something similar to what FF had 3/4 years ago before the crash. It's a scary future.


I'm all for letting the private investors in the banks go to the wall but we can't let the banks go to the wall. They are all fecked and if they go to the wall our banking system will go to the wall. There is no back up or no banks to replace them (unless we nationalise). If the banks go to the wall in Ireland it would be like removing all the roads, trains and canals in the country. We would be dealing in cash and the country would collapse. We need money to move and the banks are how it is moved.

[muppet]

The main difference between NAMA and Good/Bad bank is that NAMA gets control of the assets. NAMA gets to repossess without actually reposessing. It is a FF quango which allows FF to appoint their own people to repossess assets and hold them untill they are valuable and return them to their own people ahead of the market. Good/Bad bank would be run like a Bank with bankers running along banking rules and regulations. NAMA can do what it likes.

I'm all for letting the private investors in the banks go to the wall but we can't let the banks go to the wall. They are all fecked and if they go to the wall our banking system will go to the wall. There is no back up or no banks to replace them (unless we nationalise). If the banks go to the wall in Ireland it would be like removing all the roads, trains and canals in the country. We would be dealing in cash and the country would collapse. We need money to move and the banks are how it is moved.

Zap not all the banks in Ireland are Irish and therefore it would not 'be like removing all the roads, trains and canals in the country'it would merely be like removing all the roads that weren't funded by the EU.

[fearbrags]

I'm all for letting the private investors in the banks go to the wall but we can't let the banks go to the wall. They are all fecked and if they go to the wall our banking system will go to the wall. There is no back up or no banks to replace them (unless we nationalise). If the banks go to the wall in Ireland it would be like removing all the roads, trains and canals in the country. We would be dealing in cash and the country would collapse. We need money to move and the banks are how it is moved.

No  read  mcWilliams 
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-mcwilliams/were-the-hostages-to-fortune-in-nama-drama-1887179.html.

[Zapatista]

Zap not all the banks in Ireland are Irish and therefore it would not 'be like removing all the roads, trains and canals in the country'it would merely be like removing all the roads that weren't funded by the EU.

Fair enough but a huge percentage of Irish business', personal mortrgages, credit cards are dependant on the Irish banks. If they aren't they are dealing with suppliers and buyers who are. You would need to atleast keep them a float for a year untill all creditors to the banks transfer to samller banks which are only situated in some of the largest citys across the country. If this was intended to happen and the market new it the banks would collapse overnight.

No  read  mcWilliams 
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-mcwilliams/were-the-hostages-to-fortune-in-nama-drama-1887179.html.

Can't find that for some reason. Can you summarise for me? Cheers

[Gnevin]

""Soviet Irish Bank"'

Typcial  Fianna  Failer

That's how it will be viewed in America and on wall street

America would have had jailed some of our bankers by now and remember they let Lehmans fail along with nearly 90 others this year. That is what a free market is supposed to be.

Our version is that in good times they get rich and in the bad times the taxpayer bails them out. Some free market.

For a foreign investment point of view it would be better to let them fail than nationalise them but if course your talking about allowing the 4 biggest (or close it) banks in Ireland fail rather than the 90 bit players the US let fails and the sentiment (on CNN anyway) is that letting LB fail was mistake.

[muppet]

""Soviet Irish Bank"'

Typcial  Fianna  Failer

That's how it will be viewed in America and on wall street

America would have had jailed some of our bankers by now and remember they let Lehmans fail along with nearly 90 others this year. That is what a free market is supposed to be.

Our version is that in good times they get rich and in the bad times the taxpayer bails them out. Some free market.

For a foreign investment point of view it would be better to let them fail than nationalise them but if course your talking about allowing the 4 biggest (or close it) banks in Ireland fail rather than the 90 bit players the US let fails and the sentiment (on CNN anyway) is that letting LB fail was mistake.

The problem with analysis here as there is that all the analysts have vested interests in the subject matter.

[Gnevin]

""Soviet Irish Bank"'

Typcial  Fianna  Failer

That's how it will be viewed in America and on wall street

America would have had jailed some of our bankers by now and remember they let Lehmans fail along with nearly 90 others this year. That is what a free market is supposed to be.

Our version is that in good times they get rich and in the bad times the taxpayer bails them out. Some free market.

For a foreign investment point of view it would be better to let them fail than nationalise them but if course your talking about allowing the 4 biggest (or close it) banks in Ireland fail rather than the 90 bit players the US let fails and the sentiment (on CNN anyway) is that letting LB fail was mistake.

The problem with analysis here as there is that all the analysts have vested interests in the subject matter.

Of course sure as we both said before (I think) economics is the crystal ball science anyway .

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Fintan O'Toole in yesterday's Irish Times hits the nail once again:

Propping up of rotten banks is a huge con job

THE PURPOSE of Nama, we are repeatedly told, is to allow the banks to get back to lending money to the real Irish economy. This is unquestionably a vital aim. There is one glaring problem, however, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

Almost half of the toxic loans we're buying through Nama are held by banks who didn't lend much money to the real economy in the first place. Of the €77 billion in loans that Nama is to take on, €36 billion is held by Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society.

These institutions have damn all to do with the small and medium Irish enterprises that are supposed to be saved by Nama. This is the absurdity at the heart of the whole enterprise: we are putting up staggering amounts of money to encourage banks to get "back" to where they never were.

The big lie in the entire Government response to the banking crisis is that we had to save Anglo Irish and Nationwide (which is to say, Seanie and Fingers) because they are of "systemic importance" to the Irish economy. You only have to look at the documents released last week by the Department of Finance as part of the Nama proposal to know that this is patently untrue. In the case of Anglo Irish, just 11 per cent of its loan book is categorised as "business banking". Almost all of the rest relates to the property and construction sectors – which is to say to the bubble economy that was parasitic on the real one.

Irish Nationwide, as a mutual building society, was supposed to be in the business of giving mortgages to people to buy houses. In fact, just 22 per cent of its loan book relates to residential property. In September last year, the month in which the crisis came to a head, Irish Nationwide approved precisely zero home loans for first-time buyers.

It is thus quite easy to "get back" to where Irish Nationwide was. Even without Nama, it could surely manage a return to zero.

There's a huge con job going on here. (I don't mean to suggest that members of the Government are deliberately misleading the public. Things are much worse than that – they actually believe this stuff.) We're doubling the national debt in large measure to prop up institutions that had no real and sustainable function in any economy except the Bermuda Triangle of Fianna Fáil, the developers and the banks.

What we're doing with Anglo Irish is particularly demented. We know that this was a systemically anarchic and amoral institution. We know that it engaged in reckless lending, that it manipulated its share price through the Golden Circle caper, that it cooked its books by playing games with Irish Nationwide and Irish Life, and that, as The Irish Times revealed yesterday, some of its current executives had huge loans from their own bank. We know that its overall contribution to the real economy was like that of the Huns to the Roman Empire.

And yet, knowing all of this, we are feeding vast amounts of public money into this thoroughly rotten institution. If we assume a 30 per cent discount on the €28 billion of Anglo Irish loans that Nama is to take over, that's the guts of €20 billion. Alongside the almost €4 billion we've already put in directly and the €6 billion plus we're being told we'll have to cough up as part of the Nama process, that's an astonishing €30 billion of public resources. To call this madness would be insulting to psychotics everywhere.

Let's put this €30 billion into context. The real economy in Ireland is being crippled by the appalling failure to create a proper broadband infrastructure. The cost of building a world class, high-speed national network was estimated at the height of the boom to be €4 billion.

With the €25 billion or so left over, we could actually invest in all those "green economy" and "smart economy" companies we keep hearing about.

I find it simply incomprehensible that anyone intelligent enough to have joined the Green Party in the first place can believe that it is a better use of public resources to pump €30 billion into the corpse of a dead casino bank than to actually invest in tangible, and economically transformative, infrastructure.

In his speech last week, Brian Lenihan told us that "Nama will ensure that we avoid the Japanese outcome of 'zombie banks' that are just ticking over and not making a vibrant contribution to economic growth". But we already have, in Anglo Irish, an institution that's so zombie it should be renamed the Hiberno-Haitian Bank.

The proposition at the heart of Nama is that the way to get money to Irish businesses is to give it to a putrid, artificially animated corpse. Even at this late stage, is there any chance that someone in the Government might wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant brainwave: the way to put money into the real economy is to put money into the real economy?

[PadraicHenryPearse]

I asked this on another thread. IL & P i think have one of the most if not the most residential mortgages on its books. It is not been helped by NAMA so how does it help them?

I heard that irish nationwide, ebs and PTSb will be merged after NAMA (forced by the Govt.)

Why if people don't like NAMA so much why don't they move their money to banks that don't parttake in it?

[FermGael]

Nama - my downfall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjvCpHciYQ

[Declan]

In June this year the OECD reported that Irish pension funds notched up the biggest losses in the developed world during 2008, as retirement funds here collapsed spectacularly because they are over-exposed to shares and property.
In its updated report, the OECD also pointed out that the National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) experienced the worst performance of any sovereign or national fund within the OECD group, shedding 30.4pc of its value last year.

These are the boys that are due to set up Nama

[Caid]

Lenihan warns on NAMA start delay
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 18:20
Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has told the Dáil plans to start transferring the biggest loans from the banks into the National Asset Management Agency by the end of the year could face a delay.

Speaking at the committee stage debate of the NAMA Bill in the Dál, he said the business plan envisaged that a sizeable amount of the work would start by Christmas. 'That time limit could easily slip into January at the rate we are proceeding,' he said.

Delays in starting the NAMA process are being partly blamed for big falls in shares in the Irish banks today.

See how Irish bank shares performed here

During the debate, the opposition criticised the decision by the Minister to cap at 5% the amount of subordinated debt to be issued by the National Asset Management Agency.

5% of the loans being taken on by NAMA will be in the form of subordinated debt, where the ultimate payment will depend on the performance of NAMA assets. The banks will not receive all of this money immediately.

Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton said he had welcomed the initial decision by the Minister to make the banks share the risk with the taxpayer. But he said capping at 5% the value of bonds to be issued as subordinated debt was unfair to the taxpayer.

The Minister for Finance said subordinated debt had to carry a much higher rate of interest - between 5% and 7% - because of the risk of the debt. He said if the Government had issued up to half of the bonds in the form of subordinated debt, NAMA would be crippled with huge interest bills.

Minister Lenihan said it was not fixing the amount of interest to be paid today, but it would be in the 5-7% range. The rest of the NAMA bonds will have an interest rate of 1.5%.

The Labour Party finance spokesperson Joan Burton said the risk sharing model was intended to act as a carrot and stick approach to incentivise the banks to clean up their mess. She described the model being put forward by the Minister as 'all carrot and no stick'.

She said it was a fig leaf to hide the blushes of the Green Party, who, as part of the re-negotiation of the Programme for Government, had sought a 50-50 approach to risk sharing between the banks and the taxpayer.

Sinn Fein's Arthur Morgan congratulated the Minister on - as he put it - walking all over the Green Party on the risk sharing element. He said making the banks take 5% of the risk was nothing short of scandalous.

The Minister for Finance also said it was unlikely that he would be advertising for the first CEO of NAMA. Mr Lenihan has already given an informal undertaking to the opposition to consult them on the appointment of the first CEO, but he said subsequent appointments would be made by the board.

Will NAMA and SPV share a chief executive?

In Section 37 of the NAMA Bill in committee stage, Labour's Joan Burton asked the Minister whether it was possible for the chief executive of NAMA to also be the head of the SPV (special purpose vehicle) which will be set up to buy and manage the €54 billion worth of loans.

Deputy Burton said this relationship must be clarified because if the SVP - being privately controlled and with real powers of its own - should wish to nominate its own leader, it would, she said, be entitled to do so and that this would be problematic.

She also said there could also be serious problems should the SVP have a significant difference of opinion with NAMA.

Fine Gael's Kieran O'Donnell, said that the SVP was described in the legislation as a stand-alone body, so how could it share a chief executive with another body? The Minister for Finance said some of these matters would be regulated by shareholders. But he said he would examine this issue again before the report stage of the Bill