What percentage interest rate is paid in prizes on Prize Bonds

I appreciate the low cost funding to our government
If the State were to unilaterally expropriate assets from vulnerable groups, eg homeless people or others with mental incapacity, would you similarly appreciate the low cost funding to our government?

Bear in mind that sooner or later it might be you or someone belonging to you who is at the butt end of such sharp practice.
 
If the State were to unilaterally expropriate assets from vulnerable groups, eg homeless people or others with mental incapacity, would you similarly appreciate the low cost funding to our government?
These people have made a choice. No one forced them to go past all the other State Savings products and choose the one with no return.
 
appreciate the low cost funding to our government
for them to put up more 350k bike sheds, 1.4 million euro copper roofed security huts and posh walls in ballsbridge, no thanks. I want them to pay proper interest rates have proper competition for people's money and not having the government using people's money for their own cheap funding.
 
These people have made a choice. No one forced them to go past all the other State Savings products and choose the one with no return.
An 95-year old who buys a 10-year investment bond has also made a choice. No one forced them to go past all the other more suitable alternatives.

Any investment intermediary who advises them to make such an investment is almost certainly guilty of mis-selling and can be sanctioned by the State for that.

I think the State should stop its own mis-selling of Prize Bonds.
 
A few months Joe Duffy featured a canny couple who invested significantly in prize bonds, Joe was full of the usual blather about what smart investors they were and was keen to know how they sniffed out this clever financial hack.
 
or them to put up more 350k bike sheds, 1.4 million euro copper roofed security huts and posh walls in ballsbridge, no thanks. I want them to pay proper interest rates have proper competition for people's money and not having the government using people's money for their own cheap funding.
These two issues are unrelated. If you don't want to risk funding extravagant bikesheds, then you won't want to invest in anything issued by the State, regardess of the interest rate offered.

(Logically, you should want the state to offer a lousy return, since that will attract less funds and so pay for fewer bikesheds.)
 
I'd take the W.
Maybe I'm more than 1% stupid and naïve because I hadn't a clue what that meant and had to look it up. :D

Anyway...
Consumer advocate Brendan Burgess said the bonds are not a suitable long-term investment.
...
“They are not a suitable long-term investment. For a long-term investment, people should be in a diversified portfolio of shares,” Mr Burgess said.
 
Ya got good traction on it today on the Indo Brendan, Well done.

Interestingly I heard Brenda Power on one of the weekend chat radio shows a couple of weeks make the suggestion, that if the State and Govt. were genuinely interested in solving the housing crises and investing in state housing, they could do a lot worse than setting up a national housing investment fund for ordinary people to invest in and divert their billions of euro from banks saving a/c's offering risible returns.

It occurred to me that the NTMA have never been prepared to take on the banks head on, by offering an any way compeditivie rate of return on any state savings products such as prize bonds, always maintaining a lower prevailing rate than that offered by the banks.

So such progressive suggestion of creating a state building fund with a decent state guaranteed return, which would divert huge amounts from the banks and lessen the dependence on vulture funds for construction investment would never work because there is too much vested interest and nepotistic relationships between the banks and private investment funds and the NTMA.
 
It occurred to me that the NTMA have never been prepared to take on the banks head on
Because that's not in their remit!
NAMA is an unusual corporate entity in that it began its life with a very large balance sheet and has been given the task of managing that balance sheet down to zero as soon as it commercially practicable. It must recoup at a minimum all of the expenditure incurred by it on acquiring loans, on advancing working capital and on its own costs. In doing so, it will pursue all debts owed by its debtors to the greatest extent feasible.
Ignore this - I misread "NTMA" as "NAMA". :rolleyes:
 
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occurred to me that the NTMA have never been prepared to take on the banks head on, by offering an any way compeditivie rate of return on any state savings products such as prize bonds, always maintaining a lower prevailing rate than that offered by the banks.
Sure they get the benefit of all those deposits sitting in bank accounts anyway since the banks are required by government regulations to hold large amount of their capital in "safe assets" government bonds since financial crash. The Irish banks , insurance and pension funds are I think the largest holders of irish government bonds.

So the deposits sitting in bank accounts are another source of cheap finance for "big government " here. The only effective competition is to put your money in European banks like raisin etc, the more people that do that will increase competition and reduce the ability of NTMA to offer such bad returns
 
"Because that's not in their remit!"


I suppose when you put it like that, it does make sense that NTMA's remit is to fund government borrowing at the lowest possible rates.

If one were to substitute NTMA with The State Savings Agency, surely their remit is to attract the maximum amounts possible invested in state savings and oversee a year on year increase, as opposed to the decrease evidenced in the article.

I imagine the most effective way of achieving that would be in playing the banks at their own game and taking them on, head on by offering a better rate of return. But I appreciate that there is too much vested interest and interconnections within the financial industry for that ever to happen. The State savings Agency is a sort of cosy cartel controlled by the banks.
 
I wonder why State Savings are heavily advertising now - even on the side of busses - tax-free returns, great, but still very low returns.


Maybe the Govt wants to borrow more from the general public by tapping into the huge amount of cash lying around in even-lower deposit accounts?
 
The idea comes form the UK's Premium Bonds. These are periodically aligned with the gilt yields (currently 3.8% falling to 3.6% for the August draw) but as they are tax free they are effectively a social service. And as a social service they are rationed to a max of £50k per individual.
Prize Bonds operated on a similar basis until quite recently and were actually a no brainer for large amounts. And this was the mistake - the max holding was €250k. Amounts invested in Prize Bonds grew very fast, my guess being stuffed with joint holdings of half a million. As interest rates fell under QE so too did the rate on Prize Bonds, but here's the rub, the Prize Bonds rate did not follow the return to "normal" interest rates, instead only being adjusted to this miserly 1%.
I think the existence of so many half million elephants was responsible for this change of policy.
I think the rate on UK Premium Bonds is probably subject to some regulations. The Prize Bond rate is totally at the discretion of the NTMA.
 
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