Country Living with Francis Farragher

There’s a line from an old Frank Sinatra song, ‘Love’s Been Good To Me’ of ‘It only seems like yesterday as down the road I go’ and the other day I kind had to pinch myself when thinking that its now 16-years since we endured the financial crash that sent us all into such a spiral of economic depression.

Up until 2008, it was party time in Ireland with occasional acquaintances espousing to me the virtues of dipping into the property market with money to be made ‘hand over fist’ once one was willing to take the risk of borrowing a couple of hundred grand.

Like the pyramid sales principle, of course everything went swimmingly well, until the final clutch of buyers knew there was nowhere to go towards the end of 2008, and everything came crashing down around them.

Events like that do tend to act as markers in our lives and much the same way with the Covid epidemic of early 2020, when a few of us wryly observed in the local on the Sunday evening of March 15, 2020, that this little health ripple would be over in a matter of days . . . well at worst weeks.

Little celebratory events like birthday or retirement parties were put back by a few weeks until the whole thing blew over, but of course the reality of what was to come, presented a real jolt to our everyday lives. Looking back at it now, we tend to talk about events like births, weddings and funerals in the context of whether they were pre-Covid or not.

Hindsight can make us all look smart but one phrase I remember from the months before the financial crash of 2008 was ‘a soft landing’, one of those reassuring cliches which turned out to be as useless as a paper hat on a wet day. It’s probably my imagination but here and there, I seem to detect little clues that we shouldn’t assume our good financial times will continue forever.

Recently I spotted a little piece from a respected US economist by the name of Gary Shilling – isn’t that just a brilliant monicker for an expert on money – who predicted the crash of 2008, a year of two before it happened.

Earlier this year, Mr. Shilling, started to warn that there were danger signs beginning to emerge in the US economy of 2024 in terms of interest rate oscillations of around 2% or so. Anyway, sixteen years on from 2008, let’s hope that the Shilling predictions doesn’t come true for the next couple of years. But all of these things to tend to be cyclical.

Pictured: Seeking out a little bit of colour in a grey world.