The former head of the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), Michael Somers, who helped set up the agency during the crisis of the late 1980s, said the banks could do much more during the Covid-19 crisis.

Investors and banks across the world have handed the Irish State €1bn in free money and will effectively pay more again to keep it safe, as global markets continued to reel from the fallout of the Covid-19 outbreak.

It came as the National Treasury Management Agency -- the States' debt office -- sold €1bn of debt payable in 2029 at a negative interest rate of around 0.15%.

A reduction in the economic growth forecast due to Brexit has been halved just weeks ahead of Britain exiting the European Union.

Though everyone on this island shares, more or less, a common past many, often conflicting, versions of it are offered as an accurate record.

The escrow account in which the €14bn Apple fines are being held is set to lose €70m this year because of negative interest rates, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has warned.

Shares in the big two Irish banks and a handful of property shares played catch-up with the global market slump to post falls, taking stock of the fading hopes of a deal that would avoid Britain crashing out of the EU at the end of October.

Even though it’s more than a decade since Bertie Ahern harrumphed his infamous advice — “the boom is getting boomier” — the consequences of the madness epitomised by that phrase, and the “soft landings” and “naysayers” slapdowns too, remain chilling, almost as chilling as the idea that a person in his position could so misjudge reality.

The size of the national debt may no longer be a constraint for Government spending as the world enters a “new era” of permanently low borrowing costs, leading economist Austin Hughes has said.

Ireland has paid €60bn interest on its National Debt over the last 10 years.

The National Treasury Management Agency has appointed EY to carry out an external review of the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland.

The National Treasury Management Agency has invested disputed taxes collected from Apple in low risk, highly rated euro- dominated fixed income securities, mainly short- to medium-term sovereign and quasi-sovereign bonds, it said in its annual report.

The Government has been accused of making a "charade" of its climate change promises after it emerged it has spent more than €86m to date in buying itself out of international environmental targets.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has only €600m in additional tax cuts and spending increases - which may, at best, only allow him €300m in income tax cuts, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (Ifac) has said, in its first major report ahead of October’s budget.

So that’s Wednesday nearly wrapped up. Here’s some of the stories we published on irishexaminer.com today which we hope will help you make sense of it all this evening.

What do Bangladesh, India, Libya, the Ivory Coast, and Ethiopia have in common? Well, taking the latest projections from the IMF as gospel, that quintet will have the distinction of being the only countries in the world to have grown by more than Ireland, in terms of headline GDP in 2018, writes Philip O’Sullivan.

Cork County Council, in a countywide first, has set up a joint venture company aimed at providing major infrastructure projects which will aid the provision of public and affordable housing.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu), the umbrella body for unions across Ireland, has warned of “a catastrophe” if the UK crashes out of the EU, while the Government’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) said Irish bonds have already been affected by concerns over a no deal Brexit.

It is easy to dismiss the idea that we live in exceptional times, that our situation is unprecedented.

Ireland’s runaway rental property bubble is “unsustainable” and is making it increasingly difficult for people on salaries as high as €50,000 to find homes, the head of a State financial agency has said.

The State Claims Agency is set to be grilled today over the growing scale of the cervical cancer crisis amid revelations the Government has imposed a cut-off point for affected women to be compensated.

State loans to tackle the lack of new house building will not be rolled out until the end of this year despite being announced last October.

It’s been a while since the Victorian historian, Thomas Carlyle, described economics as the dismal science, but, even so, the discipline and its practitioners’ predictions have more influence than they did in Carlyle’s time.

The number of high fliers at the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) and the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) paid more than €100,000 has jumped by six, to 246, writes Gordon Deegan.

Here's your morning news bulletin...

Dublin PR firm Gordon MRM has beaten off competition from two other firms to retain its high profile public relations contract with the Government agency Nama.

The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) today raised €4bn through the syndicated sale of a new 10-year benchmark Treasury Bond maturing in May 2028.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has confirmed there are 125 vacant positions of a total of 1,735 posts at the Central Bank.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has confirmed there are 125 vacant positions of a total of 1,735 posts at the Central Bank.

EIB to provide €490m for construction of facility as health minster says it’s ‘unlikely’ to be named Phoenix.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has called the referral of Ireland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over the Apple tax issue “wholly unnecessary” and “unwarranted”.

The European Commission is taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to €13 billion of tax due from Apple.

Ireland will repay €5.5bn of bailout loans early to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Denmark and Sweden.

The Government is to set up an escrow fund in relation to recovering State aid from tech giant Apple.

YESTERDAY’S warning from the State’s debt agency the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) was a sobering reality check.

The flotation of AIB has proved to be more lucrative for the Government than had been thought earlier in the week, with shares rising up to 7% as an almost 29% stake of the bank was floated at €4.40 per share.

The Government looks set to raise up to €3.8bn from this month’s sale of the first tranche of the State’s 99.8% stake in AIB.