THIS time two years ago we were starting to see the unravelling of the US sub- prime mortgage market, but I don’t think any of us could have foreseen the carnage that was about to go down in the next couple of years.

SINCE I launched my latest economic outlook, I have been subjected to an incredible amount of personal insult as a result of a suggestion I made that public sector workers earning more than €50,000 per annum might take a salary cut of up to 10% on their earnings over that amount.

THE public was led to believe in recent weeks that Budget 2009 would be very rough and that has indeed turned out to be the case.

FOR investors in anything at the moment, it continues to be an extremely uncertain and volatile climate.

THE subprime crisis was the big story of 2007, is the big story of 2008 and will inevitably be the big story of 2009 and probably beyond.

THE summer silly season is coming to an abrupt end and over the coming days the nation will be returning to schools and workplaces to face into the challenges that the new work and academic year will bring.

THE news on the jobs front this week has not made for very pleasant reading.

IT APPEARS that nothing is going right for the Irish economy at the moment. Over the past week we have again been hit with a barrage of negative news on the real economy, all of it suggesting the deterioration is continuing and has not yet bottomed out.

THE Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan has attracted considerable flak since his candid comments about the economy last week.

WHATEVER way one looks at it, the Irish housing market is in serious difficulty at the moment. Prices are still falling, buyers are still not buying, and house builders are building little other than one-off housing. New home registrations in May were 61% down on a year earlier. This is a collapse by any standard.