BOOK REVIEW: LAURA SLATTERYreviews Debt Busters: Managing Your Money Through the Recession, by Eddie Hobbs; Currach Press; €16
THE PRIME-TIME television shows may not be airing quite so thick and fast, but Eddie Hobbs hasn't lost it – not yet anyway. Voted number 30 in Social & Personal's recent poll of the top 100 Irish sexiest men, he's still the cover star of his own magazine, You and Your Money, which makes him Ireland's rather surprising answer to Oprah Winfrey – not quite as rich as Oprah, but then few people are.
The Show Me the Moneyand Rip-off Republicveteran is also the author of Short Hands, Long Pockets, the sequel Lootand now Debt Busters– the third instalment of a trilogy loosely based on one of the grimmest economic tales since 1929. We know the ending to this one. Debt Bustersstarts by giving us the back story: the subprime debacle, Anglo Irish Bank, a "supplicant" Taoiseach, near financial meltdown.
“Property was sexy. Anyone who tried to rain on the parade was labelled a loser, although it was always going to end just like previous property bubbles – in a messy heap,” writes Hobbs, as he lambasts “the pronouncements of economists captive to their banking and property employers” and a “popular media themselves addicted to property advertising” for failing to prick the bubble.
Let’s remind ourselves at this point of a little more about Eddie. The National Consumer Agency (NCA), of which he is a director, describes him as a “consumer champion, financial adviser and broadcaster”. But he’s also Edward Hobbs, born November 1962, according to the Companies Office, and director of property vehicle Brendan Investments, among others.
Poor Brendan didn’t exactly display great prescience at the back end of 2007 when it failed to persuade investors to part with their cash: the company missed its €50 million subscription target by some €37 million. By then, most people knew that the investment property hotspots were getting distinctly lukewarm. Or as Hobbs admits himself (in the context of domestic house prices), “even the dogs in the street knew the game was up”.
Meanwhile, in 2006, at the peak of Hobbs’s televangelist phase, more than 1,200 Irish investors signed up to buy apartments on the Cape Verde Islands through a company called Cape Verde Development after Hobbs helped to promote it in a nationwide roadshow. (It later emerged that Hobbs had family connections to the company’s backers.)
The islands are not quite a booming tourist destination just yet and the budget airlines don’t fly there. So hopefully none of the 1,200 released equity from their homes to pay the deposits or overextended themselves to the point that a myriad of debtors are now knocking on the door. But if they did, here comes Eddie again with some advice.
Debt Bustersis a timely synopsis of what to do if you're languishing in mortgage arrears and fearing repossession; trapped by negative equity; afraid of messing up your credit rating or so deep into a financial quagmire that the time has come to prepare rescheduled debt repayment proposals for your creditors.
Hobbs describes the differences between mild debt, heavy debt and distressed debt and suggests remedies for each. Aware that financial difficulties can act as a trigger for illness, he also flags the risks of sinking into depression and includes a list of the typical symptoms.
The book is an antidote to defeatism, but its tone is still more subdued than that of Eddie Hobbs, aspiring stand-up. He does repeat one line from Rip-Off Republic: "During the boom lots of people saw their credit card limits as targets rather than limits!"
Back then, it was a sentence that he delivered to his audience with enough comic timing to guarantee that they would laugh nervously and shift in their seats in guilty recognition. Now it reads like gallows humour.
Hobbs’s origins as financial services professional seep through. Despite declaring that the concept of lending to people who can’t afford to borrow “sounds nuts”, he’s not about to abandon capitalism just yet. “For every €100 printed by government, nearly €900 can be created by the banking system,” he faithfully concludes. It’s a statistic that will prompt a collective “really?” from taxpayers.
He also takes the opportunity to hammer home his feelings on a “bloated” State sector and “loony benchmark pay awards”, which he believes meant private sector entrepreneurial types were no longer adequately compensated for taking risks. Presumably the risks that were constrained would have been smarter bets than the ones that he says turned Ireland into “Las Vegas on the Atlantic”.
Debt Bustersshows that Hobbs's canny ability to present himself as debt-busting consumer advocate on the one face and financial industry insider on the other hasn't deserted him: it is merely lying in wait for the next opportunity. Firmly in the camp that believes "the mother of all inflation cycles" is on its way, he says he has faith that "enterprise and greed" will once again usurp caution and fear.
“It will be a time for great opportunities and even greater risk. But that’s for another book,” he writes. You have been warned.
Laura Slattery is a journalist at
The Irish Times
and is the co-author of The Money Book and co-editor of Sit Tight and Get it Right: How to Beat the Recession Blues in Ireland
