Austin Hughes

speaker

415 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 19 Jun

Austin Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam · Friday business news roundup · 12 Dec 2025 podcast

But really, the story is of inflation creep right around the economy.

Clothing prices were down 7.5% a year ago.

They're up 4.4% this year.

So looking a little bit better for Christmas is going to be more expensive as well.

Yeah, it looks like the days of falling interest rates are behind us, you know, unless we see some very severe downturn in the economy at the moment.

But the noises coming from Frankfurt are increasingly saying things, rate cuts have ended and we won't be raising rates quite yet.

But mindful of what happened back in 2022,

They're probably saying we probably will raise rates reasonably early.

Now, that means the latter stages of next year, possibly even 2027.

But they don't want to fall behind the inflation curve significantly this time round.

Yes, they were a land of saints and savers because according to the CSO, Irish households saved one in seven euros they earned between June and September.

The household savings ratio rose to 14.8%.

from the long-term average is around 12%.

Now, it's not that we're squirreling money away.

The way this is calculated is that it's the gap between what we earn in household income and what we spend on consumer goods.

And a significant amount of that gap is accounted for by our spending on housing.

The CSO says that there was 8.8 billion of a gap between income and consumption.

And they reckon around 5.8 of that was spent on housing, another billion spent on pensions.

And the amount of that increase in deposits between June and September was around 2 billion.

So it's not putting huge amounts by, it's trying to afford purchasing houses in Ireland that's behind a lot of the rise in the savings ratio.

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