High Irish GDP is an illusion, Ireland is not that rich

Oh I agree, I was giving some reasons as to why it wasn't picking up Irish consumption.

Very true, when I paid my mortgage off some years back, I didn't change a thing about personal consumption, except more foreign holidays, using the saving.

Yes, but there are 9million+ incoming visitors as well, paying Irish prices. Trade with Ni is both ways, as there are no great price imbalances. Online purchases in UK attracting Irish vat should really be counted as Irish consumption. I wouldn't say that these things hugely affect the values. Perhaps there is some remittance of money by immigrants working here, so that consumption takes place elsewhere.

In relation to the comments about the Irish not being big spenders, in 2007 we spent money we did not have, perhaps now we do not spend everything. On balance, this is an improvement.

I think we're just a nation of penny pinchers who were raised by penny pinchers.

I don't think we put huge value on materialistic things anyway.

Being good craic and storytellers and jokers seems to be our form of "status".

We are gradually changing though. Eating out was a luxury in the 80s and 90s but now it's normal.

We also don't have lots of "old money".

Lots of people I know who would consider themselves "middle class" but are the first generation in their family to go to University.

These old European countries have families with centuries of wealth.

In theory Dublin and it's hinterland should have the population and money to support one of those designer/luxury goods streets like other European capitals but I don't think it'll happen now.

Free 3rd level education came in 96/97 so the kids in college now are the first generation whose parents went to University, if that makes sense.

In Germany they're called Mittelstand and they're the backbone of their economy.

You're correct though. I think in the postwar era Europe produced a lot of these SME businesses with the huge economic and technological growth.

We don't have too many.

We're very reliant on FDI and multinationals in areas like IT, Pharma, Medical devices.

We probably have a few SMEs now in food production and IT.

We used have a lot of small and medium sized property developers and builders but loads of them went bankrupt in 08. I wonder what happened to them.

These would be a few men as directors normally brothers and sons with employees and contractors underneath. These built all the shopping centres and housing estates in the Celtic Tiger era.

But these old European countries have real wealthy families going back centuries.

I'm not sure how many we have. The Guinness family I guess.

I think the future is bright for us. Even Germany's economy is faltering a little.

I wonder if self-driving cars will impact countries like Germany, Italy and France who have big automotive industries as I think car ownership will fall off a cliff in maybe 10 years.

Nothing logical about it. It is the consumption that creates the need for production and the emission should be attributed to the consumer. It make sense for countries to trade agricultural goods based on comparative advantage, and bizarre calculations should not inhibit this.

It is perverse. It could lead to each country having a mixed agriculture and inhibit trade, leading to higher emissions overall It is shameful that the Irish government are putting up with this perversity.

There might well be a case for emissions intensity to be included in manufacturing trade also, otherwise a place with high consumption and no manufacturing could do what they like.

4 doesn't apply to most of the countries. In larger countries, people holiday at home, increasing domestic consumption, in countries like Romania etc., they can't afford to travel abroad.

These two were smiling on budget day like the cats that just got the cream ... End of September...

Now corporation tax is down 45% in October and they look worried.

Mystic Meg economy 😁

You are, yeah.

As far as the Russians concerned, these planes belong to Russia (or to Russian companies).

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, they don't.

Which means, if the plane flies outside of Russia, or perhaps a few client states of Russia, it's at risk of arrest and seizure. So the plane is immediately limited to domestic flights, which makes it considerably less useful to Russia.

Russia will also find it difficult to get spare parts for a stolen plane or its engines, almost impossible to get it serviced and completely impossible to get it certified. For a civil airliner, that's a huge problem. In some relatively short period of time, the plane will become unflyable. Just how short that period is depends on your appetite for risk. (I don't mean financial or legal risk here; I mean the risk of dying in a fireball.)

There are temporary workarounds. If you have enough planes/engines of the same make and model, you can cannibalize some of them for parts for others, but this offers limited benefits — if a part is due for replacement after 1,000 hrs flying time, and you replace it with a second-hand part that has already accrued 800 hrs, that only gets you another 200 hrs. Your can use knockoff parts from dodgy Chinese sources, but your insurance immediately lapses. You can use non-authorised engineers for servicing, but you have the same insurance problem. Flying uninsured aircraft creates financial problems for Russian airlines, and for the banks that finance them. The Russian government can step in and provide financial guarantees at the taxpayer's expense, but the Russian government has its own financial pressures, what with funding a war while tax receipts are plummeting and nobody will lend to you. And there's no way round the certification problem.

So, basically, stealing the planes allows you to use them in your domestic aviation market for a while, but not a very long while.

International aviation depends on a transnationally-functioning system of aircraft registration and regulation. It's Russia that is departing from that, not "the West". Countries not aligned with the West still want to participate in international aviation. These stolen aircraft will not be safe outside Russia and a very few client states. They certainly would be liable to arrest in China or India.

(Think about it; aviation leasing companies won't want to lease aircraft to Chinese or Indian airlines if they can't recover those aircraft, should the terms of the lease be violated. So both India and China do indeed have legal mechanisms in place under which an owner of an aircraft can arrest and recover it. If the stolen planes are flown into China or India, what would stop the owners from utilising those mechanisms? You think China and India are going to repeal their laws on this topic, effectively licencing aircraft piracy, and freeze themselves out of international aviation in order to toady to Vladimir Putin? Think again; China has in fact already expressly prohibited the stolen aircraft from being flown into China, and I suspect the only reason India hasn't done so is because Russia hasn't attempted to fly them in.)

Russia can indeed make aircraft parts, but the insurance, financing and certification for civil airliners all depend on the consistent use of authorised parts. (As in, authorised by the manufacturers.) So, if any of the seized aircraft/engines have been manufactured by Russian manufacturers, there's no problem about parts. But anything by Airbus, Boeing, GE Aviation, Rolls-Royce, etc — the parts problem is a huge one. And, as of 2022, 70% of the civil aircraft in Russia were foreign-made, and they accounted for 95% of Russian civil air traffic.

You seem to have a quaint notion that if things are manufactured outside the US, the manufacturers can't control quality. I think that's fairly offensive to countries that aren't the US; it's also untrue. The point about Russian knockoff parts is not that they will be of poor quality — they need not be — but that they aren't the authorised parts, so we don't know what the quality is, and so the aircraft don't meet certification requirements. So even if the plane isn't arrested outside Russia on behalf of an owner seeking to recover it, it's liable to be grounded as not properly certified.

As for the risk of actual accident — the Russians could manufacture knockoff but high-quality parts, and they could put their top engineers onto maintenance and servicing of seized civil airliners. But none of that would solve the insurance, certification, etc problems they face and, besides, they do have other demands on their aircraft manufacturing and engineering capacity, what the the war going on an all, so this might not actually be their top priority for allocation of the available resources. Plus, however good the engineers are, they don't have access to the manufacturer's diagnostic software and systems, and they (obviously) don't have the training or experience the manufacturer's service teams have.

So far the Russians have addressed these problems by throwing money at Russian Airlines. Civil aviation traffic (both international and domestic) has fallen sharply and, while the Russian airlines save money by not making their lease payments, they are still mostly insolvent. Russia props them up with massive subsidies — $4.5 billion last year, but it will certainly be higher this year — which is the only thing that keeps them flying, at least domestically.

Well, the planes have been stolen. That's a loss, obviously. But even if the legal action is ineffective to secure immediate recovery of the planes, it may help to deny Russia much of the benefit of stealing them which, if nothing else, reduces the incentive for theft of this kind. And it may do a little more than that; it may position the owners somewhat better to recover the planes if Russian airlines do fly them to another jurisdiction. Also, devaluing the planes to Russia reduces the cost of bargaining to recover them when the war is over. The less the planes are worth to Russia, the less sense it makes for Russia to continue to suffer sanctions by refusing to return the planes and repay the lease costs on which they defaulted.

Will the Russians agree to that? Well, we don't know how the war will end, or when, or whether the planes will have any value to anybody by then. But the owners will want to position themselves to make the best of whatever the situation happens to be, which means doing everything they can to deny the Russians as much benefit as they can from the theft, and to assert and not abandon their own interest in them.

Planes are immensely valuable assets. A new A330 will cost you about US$250 million, depending on whether you want the sunroof, the rear wash/wipe and the go-faster stripes. Obviously, the owner of such an asset is going to be prepared to spend money defending their right to it; if they weren't prepared to to that, they wouldn't — and shouldn't — be in the business.

The disputes will not cost as much as the aircraft; the planes, as pointed out, are massively expensive and the proceedings will be relatively cheap. Russia isn't bothering to enter a defence (because they have no defence) so the plaintiffs will get judgment in default of defence. The cost of that will be measured, at most, in tens of thousands, not hundreds of millions.