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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Taking Stock · Are 20-somethings worse off? Cost of the EU presidency & Diversification in passive income · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

We've had a sharp drop in interest rates.

The average interest rate through the 80s was – well, there wasn't an average because it was moving quite dramatically –

But over the turn into the 90s, it was around 11%.

It was still 7.5%, nearly 8% in 1995.

Now it's 3.5%.

So you can fund a much bigger mortgage.

If you actually look at the ratio of mortgage payments on your 11% interest rate back in 1990, it would have accounted for about 40% of the average industrial wage.

By 1995, it was 30%.

And in 2025, we're talking about 25% if you take out a 90% mortgage.

But of course, another element is that there's been a very significant buildup in wealth.

So the average mortgage is lower and the average mortgage as a share, the average mortgage repayments as a share of the average industrial wave would be about 20%.

So those sorts of structural change, but a lot of them centered around, again, the change in the female participation rate and, again, the internationalization of the Irish economy.

Remember, you know, the corporation tax regime we have now only started to be phased in in 1997.

I think it was something like 30, 35 percent corporation tax rate in 1990.

Average tax rates were actually higher.

You know, the standard tax rate was about 30, 33 percent and it went up to 50.

It's a little bit lower now.

Yes, there are other issues, but we haven't altogether.

We are buying a lot more things.

The consumption now today per head is around 30,000.

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