I became one of the new-car statistics this week - three months after ordering it, I finally took possession of the new Audi A3. This is the first time I've bought the same make of car in succession - either I'm getting set in my ways or the A3 is the ideal runabout for the woman who thinks that size doesn't matter, at least when it comes to the car.

It's somewhat astonishing to realise that over 100,000 new cars have been registered in the Republic so far this year, with Dublin accounting for almost half of that number. It's hard not to think of sitting for hours in a traffic jam when you think of six-figure car numbers, although I suppose that at some point in the car-chain there's a rusting vehicle being scrapped to make room for the new shiny models.

Actually, a few years ago, nobody bought new cars on the basis that they were worth a few grand less as soon as you drove them out of the showroom. A friend of mine was recently offered more than the list price for his month-old car simply because it took so long to get them into stock and the buyer wanted that particular model now. Which, like everything in the Republic these days is a far cry from how things used to be. The idea of car-price appreciation is a novel one but it's nice to know that, even if the share portfolio might be undergoing a little rerating, the wheels are still worth a few bob.

I remember going in to the bank manager back in the dim and distant past (sometime in the 1980s when, apparently, the only way to make money in the State was to have someone hand you a brown paper bag stuffed with cash) to talk about my request for a car loan. He told me, very patronisingly, that I seemed to have worked out all my figures pretty well and, therefore, he'd recommend my request. The other day I received a brochure from a bank telling me that I could still avail of their offer to me, and many others like me (poor souls!), who were eligible for personal loans of extraordinary magnitude. It's hard to know whether I prefer being patronised or the hard-sell approach.

The banks are still falling over themselves to lend money, although with interest rates in a tightening cycle, what are the chances that they'll remember some of the suggestions in the manuals about over-extending credit?

Probably none. At some point there'll be a raft of bad debts sloshing around because someone earning around £50,000 (€63,487) a year borrowed half a million pounds to buy a couple of Porsches and a shack in Kerry.

I know that it's still cheap to borrow money, but it bothers me that debt in excess of a quarter of a million pounds has become so commonplace. A guy I know told me that he wasn't worried about piling up debt now because he had share options in his company which would bail him out when it came to payback time because they'd be easily worth £1 million or so in four or five years time. (You guess, the technology sector again!)

Banks themselves are having a more difficult time of it of late, what with financial stocks perceived as significantly less glamorous than anything else available and with their customers being targeted by a number of e-banks.

Apparently the average bank customer is seen more as a liability than an asset at the moment, since he or she is actually costing the bank money to keep and is likely to defect to an e-bank sooner or later. I'm not so sure about defection - despite my bank's inability to allow me to conduct Internet banking right now, I'm concerned about the regulation of some of the newcomers. Not that the Central Bank has ever been a shining light on behalf of the consumer, but some protection is better than none and I am marginally wary of handing over my hard-earned cash to an address in cyberspace. But maybe that's because I'm old-fashioned.

However, as long as chief executives of banks make comments like Matthew Barrett's (Barclay Bank) recently, I guess that ebanking will find some favour. Matthew told the public at large that "making profits takes precedence over maximising access" which pretty much meant that he'd close down as many Barclays branches as he felt like if he thought it would help the bottom line. Courageous move, coinciding as it does with its current saturation TV ad campaign talking about Barclays as a "big bank". It's the size thing again. It's interesting that companies (other than technology ones) don't like to have any loss-making operations anymore even to generate customer goodwill. If it's not producing, you just shut it down. As any chairman will tell you, that's what the shareholders demand. And who are the shareholders? More and more of us either directly or through pension funds.

I'll be spending the next couple of weeks trying to please my own bank manager by making a few trips to promote my newest book. For those of you who think that I must be producing a book a month, I hasten to point out that it's not quite like that. Although my first was written in 1995, it didn't get published until 1997 and I kept writing in the meantime. Which has meant that until now I've been somewhat ahead of myself. With the publication of Far From Over this month, I've caught up.

Most people think I now spend my time contemplating the meaning of life and chasing the muse, but actually I spend quite a bit of it out and about meeting people in the trade. Which is very interesting, although I end up asking questions about volumes, shelf-space, the value of sterling and all sorts of businessy questions that authors don't normally ask booksellers.

But, as a child, I always wanted to run my own bookshop so I guess it's just an extension of that particular business dream. Regretfully, though, I never dreamed of Amazon.com.

Can't have everything, I suppose.

Author Sheila O'Flanagan is a former fixed-income specialist