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• Don’t ask for credit, refusal might offend

  November 30, 2010 @ 12:47 pm | by John Collins

  At the time of writing Bloomberg is reporting the yield on Irish ten-year bondsis 9.38, a gain of almost 1.5 per cent today and up from Friday’s pre-bailout close of 9.196. (more…)

• Anyone buying or selling the 10 year bonds?

  November 12, 2010 @ 3:31 pm | by John Collins

  The issue of Irish bond prices entered mainstream discourse rather rapidly in the last three months. You may have noticed however that different media organisations seem to quote different prices, so I thought it would be useful to explain how the prices you read in The Irish Times are produced. (more…)

• So what does Mark Grant of Southwest know?

  November 10, 2010 @ 1:07 pm | by John Collins

  “Ireland is going bankrupt…they’ve got maybe 60 days of money left”. Those were the comments of Mark Grant, a managing director of Southwest Securities, a regional brokerage in Dallas, on Bloomberg TV on Monday. You can watch the video here (Bloomberg doesn’t allow embedding).

  His comments have got a lot of airplay – RTE showed the clip on both its main bulletins last night. Grant, and fellow interviewee John Brynjolfsson, chief investment officer at Armored Wolf (a Californian hedge fund) actually talk quite a bit of sense as the interview goes on – this is more a eurozone sovereign debt issue than an Irish one.

  But what’s been reported is Grant’s apocalyptic comments that we are two months away from running out of money. So why is an obscure broker from Dallas the only person saying this when every serious commentator admits Ireland is fully funded until next summer? Even our own Taoiseach has admitted that.

  It would be very interesting if Bloomberg had asked Grant and Brynjolfsson if their funds hold any positions relating to Ireland or the rest of the eurozone. It’s well known that US hedge funds have been making hay out of our problems in the last two years.