Irish Politics — Tittle-tattle and soap opera

June 27, 2020: Micheál Martin, following his election as taoiseach (prime minister), meets President Michael D Higgins (r) at Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin.

Kathy Sheridan, the Irish Times columnist, puts the so-called Golfgate firestorm in perspective stating facts that counter those who falsely blame the current Irish government or tar all the parliamentary representatives of the two biggest coalition parties for breaking national Covid-19 rules by attending a dinner following a golfing event in County Galway on August 19, 2020.

Economic consequences of the Pandemic Depression

Compare the performance of selected global stock indexes, bond ETFs, currencies and commodities from The Wall Street Journal for 2020, updated on Aug 12, 2020 at 5:50 pm ET. A chart of the losers is at the bottom of the page.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, American economists, in their 2009 book, 'This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,' said that the good news from their historical study of eight centuries of international financial crises was that they all ended. They noted that each time, the experts have chimed, “this time is different” — claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters.

This time is different while early confidence of V-shaped recoveries is waning.

Top global 2500 R&D firms- 4 Irish include 2 banks

The 2019 edition of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard rankings of the top 2,500 business research and development spenders in the world range from the top-ranked Alphabet — the parent company of Google — at €18.3bn to both Japanese and Chinese companies at ranks 2,499 and 2,500 with spending of €30.7m each. Ireland has 4 entries including 2 banks and another 22 mainly American firms that are technically "Irish" as they have headquarters in Ireland for tax avoidance purposes — this process is called a tax inversion. The total on the chart above should be 26 for Ireland (22 redomiciled companies and 4 Irish firms) as Dublin-based Pentair changed its headquarters to London when in 2017 it spun-out a new firm in Dublin, named nVent.

Amazon would have been in the first place had its annual report given a figure for R&D alone. Recode, the tech news service has reported that FactSet — a data service — estimated in 2018 that Amazon’s “technology and content” were its R&D expenditure, which in 2017 was at $22.6bn, 41% more than in 2016; $28.8bn in 2018, up 27.6% on 2017, and $37.3bn in 2019, up 24.6% on 2018.