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David Chance Opinion Inflation surge heralds a new era of volatility as world economy shifts

Welcome to a new economic era of volatility and unpredictability as the ‘Great Moderation’ and the post-crisis ‘Great Stability’ finally fade in the rearview mirror after almost 40 years.

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David Chance Opinion Look who’s talking: ECB fires a direct warning to workers on wages

The European Central Bank has a message for you and it is not a subtle one: don’t even think of asking for more pay to cover your rising living costs or we will keep on raising interest rates until it really hurts.

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David Chance Opinion Brexit’s economic dividend has gone to Ireland not Britain

Boris Johnson probably wouldn’t have won many votes if he had campaigned on a slogan of ‘Brexit will make Ireland richer’, but that is precisely what his “oven ready” deal has done by making Britain less attractive to investment and less competitive in trade.

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David Chance Opinion Late to raise rates, the ECB’s challenges are only starting

Given how far the European Central Bank (ECB) is behind the curve compared with the US Fed and Bank of England, today’s interest rate rise and another that has been signalled for September are only the catch-up before really difficult policy decisions start to emerge towards the end of the year.

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David Chance Opinion Ireland will keep shaking that magic tax money tree for a few years more

Plans for a radical shake-up of the global tax system have been delayed, giving the Government here more time to decide whether it will keep on spending a tax windfall that was worth more than €15bn last year.

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David Chance Opinion Central banks’ rate rises are going to push global economy into recession

Over half of the people alive in Ireland today hadn’t even been born at the time of the great inflation of the 1980s. Now with prices rising at a pace not seen since then, they may well be in line to experience their third big economic shock in just 15 years, after the crash and Covid, as central banks raise interest rates.

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David Chance Opinion Vladimir Putin isn’t winning the economic war any more than he is in Ukraine

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is determined that Europe will have a cold winter in revenge for backing Ukraine and, having reaped hundreds of billions of euro as a result of high energy prices, he can now afford to turn off the gas taps.

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David Chance Opinion It’s always Groundhog Day for ECB as Europe wakes up in its next crisis

When the Federal Reserve delivered its bumper 75 basis point interest rate rise last week it had enough on its plate balancing the need to control inflation against the risk of recession.

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David Chance Opinion Foreign investment is a boon for Ireland, but we need to mind the gap

Forget any prospect that Ireland's parallel economies might finally merge.

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David Chance Opinion US inflation may be peaking, but Putin’s price premium will continue to grind in Europe

Inflation in America is far from dead – it is still running around four decade highs and no one knows where it will settle – but there are signs the pace at which it has been rising may now be moderating, bringing some relief to hard-pressed households.

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David Chance Opinion Elon Musk is right about one thing, ESG needs a rethink if climate matters

Elon Musk is not someone who ordinarily attracts much sympathy, but when he protested after Tesla was booted from an ethical investment share index and oil giant Exxon – a long-time climate change denier – was not, he did seem to have a point.

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David Chance Opinion The ECB will hike to zero this year, but it doesn’t have a map beyond that

Christine Lagarde this week put the European Central Bank on autopilot for two quarter-point rate increases this year that will move it to zero for the first time since 2014. Beyond that there is no path, as no one has a clue what the long-term stable rate is for the fiscally fractured eurozone.

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David Chance Opinion Market mayhem isn’t over, catch a falling knife and you’ll get cut

Major asset classes in positive territory this year include oil, the dollar and gold. For most of the rest – whether US or European equities, German bunds or US treasuries – you are sitting on substantial losses.

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David Chance Opinion You can forget about that inflation-beating payrise, it isn’t going to happen

Across the world paypackets are being hollowed out by rapidly rising prices and while inflation has hit an annual 7.4pc in the eurozone, there are few signs that workers are anywhere near making up the shortfall.

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David Chance Opinion Fed hike piles pressure on ECB to get to grips with inflation's perfect storm

The Federal Reserve yesterday delivered its biggest interest rate rise in more than 20 years and indicated that it planned a series of half percentage point hikes for the first time since 1994 in a bid to tame surging inflation.

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David Chance Opinion The ‘Chinese Century’ is starting to fray as the West finds new purpose

By some measures, China’s economy overtook the US in 2014. Having breezed through the financial crisis in 2008 as free-market economies crumbled, it rose to the coronavirus challenge in 2020 as deaths surged in Europe and the US. China was indeed fast-becoming the global power of the 21st century.

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David Chance Opinion Our budget is in much better shape than most of the eurozone, Germany included

Despite rising interest rates and the threat of further economic disruption from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ireland’s budget is set to outperform those of so-called ‘core’ eurozone states like Germany and the Netherlands.

David Chance Opinion Central banks everywhere suffer a trust deficit as they seek to tame runaway inflation

As inflation runs at its fastest pace for 40 years, many of the world’s central banks are now raising interest rates aggressively in a bid to contain surging prices.

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David Chance Opinion If we want to stop Putin’s war, Europe needs to sanction Russian gas now

Europe’s latest sanctions on Russian coal and a ban on high-tech exports aren’t going to halt Vladimir Putin’s murderous actions in Ukraine. For that we need to stop propping up his regime with the €600m-€800m a day we pay for Russian gas which finances every bomb, bullet and death in his war.

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David Chance Opinion ‘Good’ guns and bombs are now being labelled as ethical investments

Bombs and bullets can now be considered as ethical investments, according to one of the pioneers of socially responsible investing.

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David Chance Opinion The world’s central banks may be talking like hawks, but they’re not delivering

Central banks have been shocked out of their torpor as the world has shifted rapidly from disinflation to inflation. Not a day passes without dire warnings of a rerun of the 1970s and the painful interest rate squeeze that was applied to bring prices back under control in the 80s.

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David Chance Opinion Fuel subsidies bail out Russia and SUV owners, not the poor or the planet

If the Government thinks it came up with the correct answer for hard-pressed consumers when it lopped 20c off the price of a litre of petrol and 15c off diesel, then it should think again.

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David Chance Opinion Ireland was a winner from the globalisation Putin wants to destroy

It is all over for Russia and Ikea after 20 years in which the Swedish self-assembly giant came to symbolise the emergence of a post-Soviet middle class that would transform their country into a social democracy ‘just like us’.

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David Chance Opinion ‘Buy the dip’ mantra is complacent when Putin is redrawing Europe’s map

When the Gresham Life Assurance Company of London completed its luxurious art-nouveau headquarters in Budapest in 1907 it clearly didn’t expect the world for which it was designed to fall apart in just a few years amid the bloodshed of a world war, a pandemic, protectionism and a financial crash.

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David Chance Opinion Russian invasion of Ukraine could leave Irish consumers facing further rises in energy costs, as well as more expensive bread and beer

AS VLADIMIR PUTIN’S tanks roll into Ukraine, we’re going to end up paying even more for the gas to heat our homes and for a range of groceries from bread and beer to cooking oil.

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David Chance Opinion The next financial crisis is coming, and it will be stamped ‘made in China’

The world is awash in debt and rich nations now owe the equivalent of two-and-a-half times their economic output, far more than in the financial crisis.

Davos Man: An angry charge sheet for the global elite

Davos Man is a very angry book, all 480 pages of it. New York Times journalist Peter Goodman loathes the subjects of his high-octane journey through a half-century of predatory capitalism.

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David Chance Opinion Rush to raise interest rates won’t kill inflation, but it will hit consumers

During the pandemic, 21 central banks opted for quantitative-easing programmes, many of them stepping over into fiscal policy, or at the very least blurring the lines as they desperately pumped in cash to stop economies sinking.

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David Chance Opinion Market rotation is set to push house prices even higher as Fed hikes rates

The dynamics of investing have changed dramatically over the past month.

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David Chance Opinion Where’s the beef? Meat taxes may be needed to meet climate goals

We’re all familiar with ‘sin taxes’ that aim to nudge people into taking decisions that reduce the costs to society of activities like smoking and, more recently in a different form, new rules that set a minimum price for alcohol so as to curb consumption.