Archive for January 2024

Global growth is set to stay resilient this year and only pick up pace a bit in 2025, according to a Reuters poll of economists, a stable outlook at odds with still-relatively aggressive interest rate cut bets in financial markets. Growth among leading economies is not forecast to be consistent, with relative strength in the…

Overall mortgage drawdown volumes declined in 2023, new figures from Banking and Payments Federation Ireland show, but the reduction was driven largely by a falloff in switching and remortgaging activity. Mortgage holders moved to switch providers or mortgage products in record numbers towards the latter part of 2022 as the European Central Bank started to…

The ECB’s Governing Council will meet in Frankfurt today to consider whether to make any changes to interest rates. No adjustments are expected though, despite some progress being made in bringing the inflation rate down across Europe. The rate at which prices are rising in the eurozone had been coming down for months, but reaccelerated…

Up to 29,000 housing units are being held up in the planning process or in judicial reviews, a new report from construction consultancy Mitchell McDermott has found. That amounts to almost a full year of housing output at current levels of delivery. The report calculates that 20,683 residential units are being delayed by up to…

Property price growth picked up on an annual basis for the third successive month in November, increasing by 2.9% after prices rose by 0.8% on a monthly basis, new Central Statistics Office figures show today. Annual price growth had cooled from a recent peak of 15.1% in February 2022 to a near three-year low of…

The Chief Executive of Irish Rural Link has welcomed proposed legislation that will keep cash circulating in society as more people turn to digital payments. Under plans being brought to Cabinet today by Minister for Finance Michael McGrath, shops and pharmacies will have to accept cash as part of plans to keep physical money in…

The Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment will discuss the regulatory and legislative changes required for the transposition of an EU directive on minimum wages. The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages seeks to reduce working poverty and inequality by improving the adequacy of statutory minimum wages as well as the promotion of collective bargaining.…

The professional jobs market is showing signs of stabilising with a 30% decline in the number of job seekers and an 18% drop in the number of vacancies in 2023. The figures in the Morgan McKinley Employment Monitor suggest growing stability in job tenures and a lower rate of attrition, likely influenced by retention strategies…

The number of new homes under construction has jumped, while the residential vacancy rate has dipped, a new report shows. The data from GeoDirectory, a database of commercial and residential buildings, shows that almost 23,000 new homes were being built across the country last December, up 3.5% on the previous year. After Dublin, building levels…

New movies starring Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan were some of the big winners in the Section 481 film corporation tax credit scheme for the Irish movie and TV production sector last year. New figures provided by the Revenue Commissioners show that the value of payments made under the Section 481 film corporation tax credit…