The Irish Independent reports that Ireland experienced the costliest banking crisis in an advanced economy since at least the Great Depression in the 1930s, a new IMF working paper says.
"Ireland's crisis, which started in 2008, is still the costliest since the Great Depression in terms of the economic havoc it wreaked on the country," according to the paper by the International Monetary Fund researchers Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia.
Ireland is also the only country in the world currently suffering from a banking crisis that features among the world's top 10 worst banking crises, the authors conclude, lending weight to the idea that our banking crisis is much worse than the problems in other countries.
The report comes as Environment Minister Phil Hogan warned yesterday that the country "just cannot continue to cope with very serious banking debt on top of sovereign debt".
The working paper, which does not reflect the official views of the IMF, takes a detailed look at 147 banking crises from 1970 to 2011.
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The Irish Examiner reports that an influential aviation entrepreneur said yesterday the outcome for Shannon Airport under current Government proposals "will be uninteresting, moribund and people losing jobs".
Dómhnal Slattery, chief executive of aircraft leasing firm, Avolon, was speaking at an Irish Business Aviation Convention at Dromoland Castle, which was organised by Shannon Airport and Shannon Development.
Mr Slattery also hit out at the Government’s move to establish a task force and two steering groups to chart Shannon Airport’s future. "Committees are a useful forum, but don’t start businesses and are very rarely effective," he said.
In May, the Government announced that Shannon would be separated from the Dublin Airport Authority, but remain in public ownership. Mr Slattery said that while the committees contain some great people, "none of them are entrepreneurs".
He said the Government "has pretended to do something by putting Shannon into an interregnum, but has only kicked the can down the road, make it someone else’s problem and put off the ultimate decision". He said the Government should privatise Shannon.
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The Irish Times reports that businesses backed by State agency Enterprise Ireland added more than €2 billion to export sales last year, figures released by the organisation show. Enterprise Ireland, which is charged with supporting home-grown businesses, published its annual report for 2011 yesterday.
The figures show that exports from Enterprise Ireland-supported companies reached a record €15.2 billion last year. That included €2.14 billion of new export sales. Its client companies created 9,076 new jobs, but 9,070 people employed by such businesses lost their jobs during the year, leaving a net of just six new posts.
Launching the report, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, said this was an improvement on previous years when the numbers employed fell. In 2010 more than 5,000 people lost their jobs in Enterprise Ireland-supported companies and employment fell by a total of 30,000 in three years to last year.
Mr Bruton argued that the 2011 numbers showed that employment had stabilised.
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The Financial Times reports that the US and UK authorities have fined Barclays more than $450m for attempting to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, a benchmark interest rate that is used globally to set the price of everything from credit card fees to corporate loans.
Bob Diamond, Barclays chief executive, said he and three of his top lieutenants would waive any bonus for this year “to reflect our collective responsibility as leaders” as the British bank admitted to “misconduct” spanning five years and three contintents in its submissions to the bank panels that set Libor and Euribor, the Brussels rate.
The Barclays settlement is the first shoe to drop in a sprawling probe that was launched by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now spans nearly a dozen regulators and more than 20 banks. Wednesday’s settlements were with the UK Financial Services Authority, the CFTC and the and the US Department of Justice.
