Quotes of the Week

• Figures show national house price reduction of 1.1% in April; First four months of 2008 reduction stands at 3.3%, while year on year the rate is 9.2%; New house prices fell by almost double the national rate. - Permanent TSB / ESRI House Price Index.
• "First-time buyers have been hit and hit hard by the credit crunch, and so far our Government has done nothing to help them or intervene in the market" - Joan Burton, Labour's finance spokeswoman.
• “House prices are back to 2003 levels in many parts of the country” - David Clerkin, Sunday Business Post.
• “Nobody can seriously expect that we will exceed last year’s [commercial] take-up figures” – John McCartney, Lisney.
• “Developed economies have recorded some tremendous hits over the past 12 months. In the light of these big hits, things could have been a lot worse than they are.” - Jørgen Elmeskov, acting OECD chief economist.
• “A quarter of all construction workers will lose their jobs by the end of next year” – Irish Independent.
• “On the basis of our regular economic and monetary analyses, we decided at today’s meeting to leave the key ECB interest rates unchanged” – Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the ECB
• "We considered that - it is not excluded - that after having carefully examined the situation, we could decide to move our rates by a small amount in our next meeting in order to secure the solid anchoring of inflation expectations" - Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the ECB