For decades the question has been when China would overtake America to become the world’s number one economy. Now the question being posed is, how quickly will China peak and then decline?
For all of the concern about tech job losses after Meta announced a new round of cuts last week, the problem for many firms both here and in Europe, where unemployment is also at record lows, is too few workers.
Central Bank of Ireland governor Gabriel Makhlouf was asked last week whether he thought institutions like his had lost public trust. His response was yes, to a degree, and that ”we need to talk to people and communities in a language they understand”.
It really doesn’t matter whether you call Ireland the “biggest tax haven in the world” or whether you use the less freighted term ‘investment hub’, the State’s sudden embarrassment of riches has little in common with finding oil at the bottom of the garden and everything to do with half a century of industrial policy centred on foreign investment onto which were grafted schemes to enable aggressive tax shifting by multinational firms.