Word: economists
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...switch? "The facts changed and the situation worsened," Paulson said during the Q&A. He kept coming back to that phrase, "the facts changed," in what seemed to be a conscious reference to economist John Maynard Keynes' famous line, "When the facts change, I change my mind." As Paulson put it in an answer to another question, "I will never apologize for changing the approach or strategy when the facts change...
...incentives fueled a buying frenzy that pushed up both prices and housing stock: the cost of an average house rose almost three-fold in the decade through 2006, while some 40% of the country's housing was built in the last decade, according to Brian Devine, an economist at Dublin-based stockbrokers NCB. At the Grange, a swish 11-acre (4.5 ha) development in Dublin, realtors sold 15 luxury apartments a week even before work started on the complex...
...construction mania fast became "a growth that squeezed all the other organs of the economy," says John Fitz Gerald, an economist at Dublin's Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). That starved Ireland's exporters of valuable resources. The result: the country's share of euro-zone exports has slipped by a fifth since 2001, while housing investment grew to 14% of Ireland's economy by 2006, roughly three times the European average. When values and demand began to fall - house prices fell 10% in the year to August, while apartments at the Grange are now selling at a rate...
Repairing that will require the nation to kick its housing addiction. In future, says Rossa White, chief economist at Davy, a Dublin-based brokerage, "Ireland, as a small economy, will rely on trade to generate increases in living standards. We need to get back to that. We lost sight of it." That won't be easy, as long as major trading partners are themselves caught up in the slowdown; the U.S., for instance, buys roughly a fifth of Ireland's exports. It'll take some time, too, for exporters to redeploy resources such as labor freed by the housing slowdown...
...Taken together with the recent expansion of social welfare and amendments to the rural land law that will enable peasants to effectively lease out the right to use their land, the changes amount to a "New Deal with Chinese characteristics," JPMorgan economist Jing Ulrich wrote in a recent report. They also represent a political triumph for President Hu Jintao and his Premier, Wen Jiabao. The two men have been stressing the importance of measures aimed at relieving poverty in the countryside since coming to office in 2003. Until now, their efforts to enact concrete measures to back those promises have...