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Mortgages
Read more about: Economy, Housing 
There has been much comment recently on the indebtedness of the nation such as Conor’s post on €1.3 TRILLION REASONS WHY IRELAND HAS AN OVERDRAFT FOR AN ECONOMY. On of the questions is how much of that debt is housing and how do we compare. Luckily someone else has done the work for me. Morgan Stanley published this report a few months back. And here is a graph of mortgage debt ratio to GDP.
As can be seen from the graph that while Irelands debt rate is fairly high it is not ludicrously high. It is behind Switzerland, Denmark, UK and Netherlands all countries that score higher then us in competitiveness. (although it has nearly doubled since 2002)
Another thing is looks at is what caused the rise in house prices.
From these it can be seen the boom in Ireland actually has many reasons. Interest rates being low, population growth and real income growth.
Other interesting findings from the report is that Irish housing while being the highest in cost. Yet the price to disposable income per household is just above average and 6th highest.
Now I know I have not added much comment with this post. But the report itself does some of that. It certainly should be read, the more we know what is happening with the economy the better. If morgage debt is about 63% of indebtedness which is about 120 billion. Where does the other trillion come from.
The cso’s report which I put as a link in my post has the breakdown of the 1.3 trillion. Here’s the link again.
http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/economy/current/externaldebt.pdf
also, neither Switzerland, Denmark, UK, or the Netherlands have 25% of their economy tied up in domestic construction, so comparisons don’t really reveal anything. If we can find a country that has 25% of its economy tied up in domestic construction, and has roughly Ireland’s debt, then we can talk about comparisons.
This is not a post about dependency on construction but on the in debtness of the nation.
That graph looks like it is only tracking the Government debt to GDP ratio which has been coming down in Ireland. A feature of the Irish economy over the past 5 years in particular is how government debt to gdp has been reducing while consumer debt to gdp has been exploding.
According to the report Keith it is mortgage debt which I guess excludes Government and non-house consumer loans. Also mortgage debt has gone from 32% ish in 2002 to 63% in 2006. Which is as you same quiet a large growth