Market Musings 27/8/2012

(Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in AIB, Bank of Ireland and PTSB) Since my last update I was pleased to see that deposits at Ireland’s covered banks (AIB, Bank of Ireland, PTSB) were +10% year-on-year in July 2012. This is a helpful vote of confidence in the system, given that it suggests that overseas deposits (given the sclerotic domestic economic situation) are returning to the Irish financials.

 

Speaking of Ireland Inc, there has been an intense focus in recent days around the possible introduction of a property tax. Ronan Lyons, who is the most authoritative voice on the Irish property sector, has written a good piece outlining the different considerations around such a measure. I agree with him in principle that we should have such a tax, particularly given that too much of our tax revenues are dependent on flows instead of stock. I say ‘in principle’ because I have difficulty in seeing how Irish people can shoulder yet another tax at this time – we currently have a situation where more than 1 in 5 mortgages are in trouble, while more than 1 in 7 people in the labour force are out of work. Throw in the effects of rising taxes over the past few budgets and falling incomes and I think we could be facing a scenario of mass evasion / people (in many cases justifiably) pleading inability to pay similar to the household charge debacle from earlier this year. Some have argued that a modified ‘property tax’ taking into account incomes should be introduced, but that would in practice only amount to yet another income tax, which will act as a disincentive to work (given the already elevated marginal tax on incomes in Ireland).

 

In the energy sector, I was unsurprised to see a surge in applications for UK North Sea licences following the British government’s reversal of its previous anti-investment stance, which I had been critical of. I hope to do some work on the firms focused on the UK continental shelf (Xcite Energy in particular seems to have a lot of fans) over the coming weeks.

 

In the pharma space, there was an interesting article in The Irish Independent around the prospects for a sale of Elan Corporation that’s worth checking out.

 

(Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Ryanair plc) In the airline sector, the Irish government made the astonishing revelation that it has yet to formally discuss a sale of its stake in Aer Lingus to Etihad. Considering that a sale of State assets has been agreed with the Troika as part of Ireland’s “bail-out” and Etihad having recently signaled that it may also bid for part of Ryanair’s stake, I would have imagined that Dublin wouldn’t have been slow out of the blocks to have proper talks with the Middle Eastern carrier. This is especially so given that Etihad can effectively only buy either the government’s stake or most of Ryanair’s holding, because even though as a non-EU carrier it can, in theory, buy up to 49% of Aer Lingus, in practice Irish stock exchange rules which say you have to bid for the whole company if you go above 29.9% rules this out for the time being at least (there are some ways of circumventing this, but they would likely prove cumbersome to execute in the short-term).

 

Finally, I was sorry to read that Calum has closed his blog. There is a dearth of high quality blogs in the UK and Ireland covering the stock market and the demise of yet another one is a great shame.