Full coverage: Economy

Prices, interest rates, profits and wages are re-aligning before our eyes. As always in cases of high volatility, there will be winners and losers.

The future path of inflation is extremely difficult to forecast. Businesses are going to have to adapt to a new regime and wages are going to have to rise. We are facing a year of distributional discontent.

A strong showing by the US software multinational in December helped maintain annual growth in corporation tax receipts.

Is the corporation tax surge over? The short answer is no. What is over is the era of ever-expanding tax takes. We are dependent on a small number of firms doing very well. Their granular success is ours: When they have a down quarter, so do we.

Too often, anecdote tramples evidence and confected emotion drowns reasoned argument. Like Brexit fever and Trump mania, there is no easy balm. But before we succumb, we should ponder the cat, the box, and the future. We might not get another chance.

With a background in financial services and renewable energy, Mason Hayes & Curran managing partner Will Carmody has a wide-ranging view of the Irish economy. He talks about growing the law firm along with its clients and the opportunities ahead.

We have the money to do something about infrastructure, climate change and ageing, and that much must be celebrated, even as its allocation under a coherent plan is yet to come.

A major new report from the Fiscal Advisory Council has modelled the impact of climate change on our finances and it is not pretty. It is high time our politicians started explaining those costs to people as honestly as possible.

The chance to be transformative for the nation is rare for any individual or group. Ministers for finance get a go at it every year. This may be the last budget that can be ambitious in structural terms for some time to come and it is too good a chance to waste.  

No one really cares where windfall corporation tax is coming from as long as it keeps coming and, absent radical political change in the US, it likely will. What to do with it? We currently have no coherent answer.