Economist Jim Power who says we shouldn’t demonise the rich predicted a ‘soft landing’ in 2007. How do these people still get ink & airtime is beyond me

17 comments

1. Yawn!

2. Well Eddie Hobb’s is advertising on the radio, you could hardly expect him to keep all his bad takes to himself while Eddie steals all the glory.

3. I wonder how many bad takes you’ve had in the last 15 years. We now know Jim Power has had at least one.

4. In fairness the situation in 2007 & now are two completely different things

5. “The rich = anyone earning over €38k” 🤡

6. So he should be banned from the airwaves forever? You ever say something wrong in your job?

7. If individual economist’s warnings were worth anything they wouldn’t be giving them away so easily. That applies as much now as then.

8. Economists are a bunch of absolute chancers. They have a 50/50 chance of being right, and when they are right they never shut up about having been right, and when they’re wrong they bury their heads and wait for the next situation to make predictions on. Then they study a bit about it and similar previous situations, the related indicators and have another guess at what the outcome is and then talk about that prediction with such conviction as to make listeners think “this person sounds like they know what they’re talking about”.

   You have to question RTÉ and anyone else that gives them the time of day after having been so wrong the previous time they were wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day, an economist might be right occasionally, but they’re probably wrong more times than they’re right. Plus, if you predict a recession for long enough, eventually one has to happen and they just claim that was the recession they were talking about all along, for the last 3-5 years.

   Seriously, it’s like anyone asking Bertie Ahern on his opinion about anything other than how he managed to live and survive without a bank account. Any other question reporters ask Bertie at this stage of his irrelevance should be struck off the register of journalists.

9. He doesn’t say either in that video. What do you have against him?

10. Ironically some who got the crash right (like Morgan Kelly) were way too pessimistic about the recovery.

    I recall Kelly & others were calling for empty houses owned by NAMA to be demolished.

11. Austin Hughes another

12. His podcast is great. I’d highly recommend you listen OP. You might learn a few things.

13. Not defending him as s person but at least don’t make up shit. He said not to demonise “high earners”, not the rich, and he referenced the top 20% of earners, so a sizeable proportion of the population.

    I feel like a lot of people aren’t able to distinguish rich people and above-average earners. Someone earning 80k with no house isn’t benefitting from the housing crisis or making your life worse. They might have things a bit easier, but that’s just the nature of wages.

14. Jim Power seems like the sort of lad who answers every phone call and agrees to every invitation and even appears at the station door on a bike with 15 minutes to go so he can be happy out talking absolute bollox for decades.

15. Used to be a weather forecaster on rte

16. To be fair, there are so many moving parts to the current globalised looming monetary crisis. It’s really hard to know what’s going to happen. All the central banks of the world have been during in recent times is turning on the printing presses and creating more money to meet national deficits, coronavirus supports for business, PUP style payments et cetera.

    Of course, inflation was going to get out of hand, but no one seemed to care at the time. Now to alleviate it ever so slightly central banks have to increase interest rates, which will tank markets and those on variable rate mortgages or national governments selling bonds to cover debt. It’s very hard to guess what’s going to happen.

    I don’t think a 2007 style property crash will happen here, there was a massive oversupply of houses and no people to live in them. Now, there is a massive undersupply of houses the government bringing in approximately an additional 30 K refugees per month. They have to live somewhere and Council/local authorities have quotas for housing units to be purchased.

    I agree that some economic and political commentators have a neck like a jockey’s bollix many comes to making predictions, but for me it’s a case of don’t hate the player hate the game (if that makes sense)

17. If you swallow your self-esteem and parrot free-market Economist talking points, you can cry yourself to sleep on a big pile of money every night.