The Irish Independent reports that Green Party TDs and councillors are wading through a deluge of emails from angry members begging them to oppose the NAMA plan.

Under a highly organised and pro-active campaign by the anti-NAMA section within the party, dozens of emails are being sent to ministers, TDs and councillors on a daily basis.

Last night, a private meeting of a small number of councillors and unsuccessful election candidates took place in Dublin in an effort to tease out the complex NAMA proposals ahead of two special party conventions.

The first will take place on September 12, followed by another convention in October when members will vote on the "bad bank" proposal.

If two-thirds of the party's members vote against NAMA, the parliamentary party would be prevented from supporting the legislation in a Dail vote -- a move that would spell disaster for the Fianna Fail/Green Party coalition.

Pressure

Ministers John Gormley and Eamon Ryan are under increased pressure to obtain "significant changes" that would minimise the risk to the taxpayer.

Such changes would boost support for NAMA among members but there is a section of the party who now advocate temporary nationalisation and are resolutely opposed to the bad bank proposal.

The emotive anti-NAMA emails, some of which are very similar in their arguments, generally conclude by asking the elected representative if he or she will oppose or support the NAMA proposal at the party's conventions.

The party's economic spokesman, senator Dan Boyle, is understood to be replying to many of them.

In one, the Greens are urged not to allow Fianna Fail to commit the "greatest robbery" of the Irish people in the history of the State.

The emailers claim NAMA is the biggest decision ever to confront the country, and urge the party hierarchy to stop it from progressing.

The Irish Independent also reports that owners of investment properties and second homes have been warned that they need to pay the new property tax on second homes by the end of next month or they will face heavy fines.

The new €200 tax comes into effect next month, but many owners of second homes and investment properties are not aware of the fact that the payment deadline is fast approaching.

The annual tax is payable to the local authority where the property is located, but many councils do not know who owns what property in their area, according to mortgage adviser Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers.

"People may not be aware that this is coming up and if they do not pay it then there is a monthly 10pc surcharge imposed for failing to pay," he said. Failure to pay the charge on non-principal private residences will incur hefty fines of €20 per month -- but the amount is rolled-up, meaning that the bills soar over time.

For example, a person who fails to pay the tax for one year will owe €200 for the levy, plus €240 in fines, giving a total of €440.

Taxes and fines left unpaid will accumulate annually.

The late payment fee will apply to all payments made after October 31 next, according to tax adviser Joe McCall of Byrne & McCall.

Failure to comply with the new law could result in a fine of up to €2,000.

Fees

Mr McCall said that the outstanding charges and unpaid late payment fees will remain as a charge against the property for up to 12 years, even if the property is sold.

Local authorities have been given extensive powers to examine the likes of electricity bills to make sure owners of holiday homes pay the second home tax.

Councils will be be able to check utility bills to see if power is turned off during the winter months -- suggesting that the homes are only used as summer residences.

And they will also be examining the voter register and land registry records to see how many people owe the tax.

Announced last October, the new tax is expected to give local authorities up to €40m per year in additional funding. Mr McCall has advised his clients: "If you are a property owner, we recommend that you review your property portfolio immediately and arrange for payment of the €200 charge in respect of each property, as applicable.

"Please remember that the payment deadline for 2009 is September 30, 2009."

Owners of investment properties and second homes can pay the charge electronically at the website, http://www.nppr.ie/.

The Irish Times reports that the Irish Nationwide Building Society is preparing to launch a range of home loans, putting into effect its plans to move away from commercial lending in favour of growing its residential mortgage business.

Among the products being developed is a number of high loan-to-value mortgages for first-time buyers to grow its share of this market, as the building society attempts to concentrate on expanding the home loan side of its business.

The building society is also planning to recruit a new head of commercial lending for Ireland and Britain in the coming weeks.

The executive, who is expected to be appointed in the coming weeks, will play a key role in liaising with the Government’s toxic loans agency, Nama, which is estimated to acquire up to 75 per cent of the society’s €10 billion loan book.

The building society grew its commercial loan book aggressively during the property boom, particularly in lending to developers.

About 80 per cent of Irish Nationwide’s €10 billion loan book relates to commercial property, with just €2 billion outstanding from residential mortgage borrowers.

Irish Nationwide’s new mortgage products are currently being developed. A staff meeting has been scheduled for later this week at which employees are expected to be briefed on the products, although sources close to the building society said that the launch of the new loans was not imminent.

A spokesman for Irish Nationwide declined to comment when contacted yesterday evening.

Irish Nationwide chairman Danny Kitchen told members at the annual meeting last May that the building society planned to reduce commercial property loans to about 50 per cent of its overall loan book by 2013, and that the lender would try to “prudently expand its home mortgage business”.

The building society this week sold an additional €500 million of Government-guaranteed bonds, bringing to €1.75 billion the amount Irish Nationwide has raised using the support of the State bank guarantee, which expires in 13 months’ time.

The Irish Times also reports that about 7,000 staff will be affected by Ulster Bank’s plans to cut back on the benefits to staff in its final-salary pension scheme, close its defined benefit pension scheme and freeze pay this year.

The bank has announced that it plans to cap the annual increase in employees’ pensionable pay by 2 per cent or the rate of inflation, whichever is the lower. This will mean that, even if staff receive large pay increases or promotions, only a maximum 2 per cent increase would be used when calculating their pension.

Ulster Bank also intends to close the company’s defined benefit scheme, in which employees who retire receive a set percentage of their final salary, to new staff members from November 1st. The bank is also freezing pay for all staff for 2009.

The changes were announced in line with similar measured introduced by the bank’s parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which is 70 per cent-owned by the UK government.

Ulster Bank said that it was introducing the changes “in light of the current economic situation and to control the cost and future liabilities to the group”.

The bank will enter a period of discussion with union representatives of employees, the company said in a statement.

The Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA) rejected the bank’s proposals, saying that its members in the bank were being “severely punished for the profligate lending policies of senior management in both Ulster Bank and RBS”.

“Despite the huge contributions and sacrifices of members throughout the country, once again staff are being asked to bear the brunt of this mismanagement,” said IBOA general secretary Larry Broderick.

The union said that the proposals had come as a huge surprise as the bank had advised as recently as Monday that it was “committed to entering a conciliation process on pay at the start of September”.

Rejecting the pay freeze, the IBOA said that Ulster Bank were “being discriminated against” as RBS staff had received payment for a profit share of 10 per cent and a cost of living increase for 2009 despite the bank recording a loss of £24 billion.

The union said that it plans to ballot members in the coming days and will ask independent conciliator Kieran Mulvey, who will meet the bank and union on September 2nd, to deal with the matter.

Ulster Bank has embarked on a range of cost-cutting measures as the bank’s losses have spiralled due to bad loans primarily to developers as a result of the collapse in the property market.

The bank said last month that it would be seeking a further 250 redundancies in addition to the 750 job losses announced at the start of this year with the closure of mortgage lender First Active and its merger with Ulster Bank.

The Irish Examiner reports that profits generated by Irish hotels are set to plunge 70% this year as occupancy levels hit a 15-year low.

The hotels will also have to face repaying €7 billion owed to banks as they battle against falling sales and engage in heavy discounting.

It is also expected that 10% of hotels will close over the coming two years, resulting in 2,800 job losses in an industry that employs 90,000 people.

A survey by accountants Horwath Bastow Charleton found that although overall occupancy levels were down 6% last year, domestic tourism was up.

It said this year is proving to be even more difficult with turnover so far down 30%, leaving many hotels in survival mode.

Last year, turnover dropped by 8%, leading to profit levels being down almost 25% in the industry.

Dublin hotels suffered a turnover drop of 11.6% in 2008, luxury hotels a fall of 12.3% and larger hotels of 100 rooms or more were down 10.7%.

Horwath Bastow Charleton partner Aiden Murphy said: "The real concern is that these much reduced sales and profit levels are reflective of the slowdown for the sector that accelerated in pace as 2008 ended. As the Irish economy is in recession, unemployment levels are increasing and as curtailment of government agency expenditure continues, this will result in the hotel sector remaining under pressure for quite some time."

The survey notes that, despite discounting by hotels, Ireland is an expensive place to visit for overseas tourists.

It said the sterling/euro currency exchange rate on average for the year weakened by 17%, meaning the 3.87m British visitors did not see the benefit from the reduced prices. Also it notes that this makes the North a more attractive proposition for leisure breaks both internationally and domestically.

Mr Murphy said many hotels will be left with cash flow difficulties this year and next particularly when bank loans "estimated to be €7 billion" are considered.

The domestic market accounted for 65% of hotel bed-nights in 2008, up from 53% in 2004, and the survey said the resilience of this sector will be a "key factor" in how the hotel industry performs going forward.

The accountancy firm, which specialises in the hospitality sector expects to see hotels change their operating style over the next year having more seasonal closures and being used for alternative purposes.

It said Dublin is likely to benefit going forward from the opening of the O2 arena and the Aviva Stadium and National Convention Centre which will also boost demand levels.

The Financial Times reports that banks will be barred from lucrative French government mandates if they fail to abide by new international guidelines on pay, President Nicolas Sarkozy warned on Tuesday as he unveiled tough domestic rules on rewards for traders.

“We will not work with banks that do not apply the rules,” the French president said after a meeting with the country’s top bankers, who were summoned to the presidential Elysée Palace. The executives included Baudoin Prot of BNP Paribas, Frederic Oudéa of Société Générale, and Georges Pauget of Crédit Agricole.

Mr Sarkozy unveiled a series of measures aimed at tightening French rules on banking pay and improving the disclosure of bonus payments.

These include deferring traders’ bonuses over three years, paying one-third of awards in shares, and imposing strict long-term performance criteria in order to receive full payment. The government has also appointed bonus watchdogs at banks that have received state aid.

Top French banks including BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole have signed up to the new rules.

The measures take recommendations on traders’ pay made at the G20 summit last spring a step further. Under those guidelines, guaranteed bonuses are to be banned, payment deferred over several years and the cost of risk must be included in remuneration policy.

Michel Camdessus, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, will become the government’s new bonus czar, monitoring pay policy in state-aided banks, with special attention to the rewards given to the top 100 traders.

Mr Sarkozy said he wanted France to “take the initiative” ahead of next month’s G20 summit, where the question of traders’ pay would be “essential ... Paris must be irreproachable”. He said he would push his international partners to adopt France’s tighter rules, and to deploy sanctions such as the allocation of government mandates, at the meeting in Pittsburgh.

Mr Sarkozy said he would also call on G20 countries to set a limit on bonus payments. However, he said France could not set a limit on its own if the Paris market was to retain its competitiveness. “If we limit bonuses only in France, everyone will leave,” he said.

The French president said he would begin his campaign on Thursday in a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. Mr Sarkozy’s decision to hold the meeting on his first day back from holiday highlights the political sensitivity of pay in France as the country prepares for regional elections in the spring.

Though French banks were among the first to adopt the G20’s recommendations on traders’ pay, BNP Paribas generated controversy this month by providing €1bn ($1.4bn) for possible bonuses this year.

The announcement left Mr Sarkozy, who has made the fight to moralise capitalism his own, highly embarrassed and he has asked the Banking Commission to launch an investigation into pay from next month. On Tuesday , Baudoin Prot, chief executive of BNP Paribas, said that the bank would implement the new agreement immediately and only €500m would now be set aside for possible bonuses this year.

The FT also reports that UK Cabinet ministers believe Gordon Brown is preparing to shift towards a more open approach to the need for public spending cuts, after months of cabinet tensions over his allegedly “dishonest” stance on the issue.

Ministers expect that Alistair Darling’s autumn pre-Budget report will set out measures to make further inroads into a deficit projected to be about £175bn in both this financial year and the next.

Government officials said on Tuesday the chancellor had so far set out only a “direction of travel” for cutting the deficit, suggesting that further explicit cuts would be announced before Christmas on top of £35bn in efficiency savings.

The Independent quoted one cabinet minister as saying: “Efficiency savings are useful but not a substitute for real savings. There will be things that need to be put off, done more slowly or abandoned altogether.”

Downing Street rejected suggestions Mr Brown had bowed to cabinet pressure or that he was about to adopt a completely different approach.

But his allies expect the prime minister will shift his language on the need for further spending cuts during the autumn

Mr Darling and Lord Mandelson, business secretary, have both argued that Labour needs to be more explicit about its priorities – areas of spending to be largely protected – and where further cuts could be made.

They want the prime minister to refine his stark “dividing line” between “Labour investment and Tory cuts” in favour of a debate which paints Labour as benign cutters and the Tories as ideological hatchet-wielders.

Downing Street denied that the Trident nuclear deterrent was in its sights as it searches for further cuts, but high earners in the public services are likely to be targeted as the government looks for new savings.

John Denham, communities secretary, will on Wednesday write to the Audit Commission to demand an investigation into the practice of council chief executives winning payoffs of as much as £500,000 – only to reappear at other councils a few months later.

Mr Denham will demand reassurances that taxpayers’ money is not being used “inappropriately”.

“It’s not acceptable for town hall chiefs and council leaders to agree expensive deals to part company just because they don’t get on or because they’d prefer to work with someone else,” he will say.

Mr Denham’s intervention is the latest example of ministers seeking to prove their hairshirt credentials at a time of worsening public finances.

Recent high-profile local authority cases include John Foster, who received a redundancy payout of £340,000 from Wakefield council – after clashing with the council leader – before re-emerging as head of Islington council a few weeks later.

The Audit Commission said in a report last year that salaries for council chief executives had risen by a third between 2003-04 and 2007-08. It found that turnover rates had been growing – adding to wage inflation – even though bosses recruited internally performed just as well as outside hires.

Philip Hammond, shadow chief secretary, said reports indicated that Mr Brown’s cabinet “are clearly uncomfortable with his dishonest claim that Labour will not cut spending after the next election”.

The New York Times reports that the nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates on Tuesday.

The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget raised its 10-year tally of deficits expected through 2019 to $9.05 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than it projected in February. That would represent 5.1 percent of the economy’s estimated gross domestic product for the decade, a higher level than is generally considered healthy.

The Congressional Budget Office, which unlike the administration did not account for the president’s policy proposals in its latest report, increased its projection of deficits over the next decade. Absent any changes in law, it said the deficit would rise to $7.1 trillion, from $4.4 trillion in March.

The C.B.O. did analyze the president’s budget in June and concluded his proposed tax cuts and spending would push deficits through 2019 above $9 trillion. While the administration now agrees with that figure, technical data in the new C.B.O. report suggests that if it were to review the Obama budget now, it would project deficits through 2019 above $10 trillion, analysts speculated.

Anticipating that the deficit figures will stoke the debate over the costs of Mr. Obama’s effort to overhaul health care, the administration was quick to say that much of the projected deficit was a legacy of the Bush administration and that the Obama administration was committed to restoring budget discipline when the economy recovers.

“Over all, it underscores the dire fiscal situation that we inherited and the need for serious steps to put our nation back on a sustainable fiscal path,” Peter R. Orszag, the president’s budget director, wrote on his agency’s Web site.

As the president has argued before, Mr. Orszag said that rising deficits make an overhaul of the health care system essential, because the government’s ballooning costs for Medicare and Medicaid are “the key driver of our long-term deficits.”

Congressional Democrats echoed that argument in statements reacting to the budget reports. But Republicans concluded otherwise.

“While the U.S. health care system does need to be reformed, we cannot ignore the fiscal realities of our situation,” Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. “We must proceed with extreme caution before putting in place a huge and costly new program that will threaten our economy and the future of our children,” he added.

The budget updates from the White House and Congress, required each summer by law, incorporate economic data from last winter that turned out to be worse than either public or private forecasters expected as the year began, and also reflect the costs since then of spending and tax cuts to stimulate the economy and bail out the financial, auto and housing sectors.

Amid signs that the downturn has hit bottom and a slow recovery was under way, one lagging indicator troubles Democrats. The administration now projects that while the economy will return to growth later this year, though more slowly than it forecast in February, the unemployment rate will top 10 percent before employers start rehiring. That would be up from 9.4 percent in July, and a sharp jump from the 8 percent that the administration forecast earlier.

The relative good news was that the administration and Congress’s budget office reduced their projected deficits for the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

Each agency now says that the fiscal 2009 deficit will reach $1.6 trillion, or 11.2 percent of G.D.P., the highest level since World War II. Previously the administration projected $1.8 trillion, or nearly 13 percent of G.D.P.; the Congressional office had projected $1.7 trillion.

The reduction for just this year is largely because of lower-than-expected costs for rescuing financial institutions and because some banks repaid money from the $700 billion bailout program that began in the last months of the Bush administration.

When Mr. Obama took office, his budget office projected it had inherited a deficit for 2009 of $1.3 trillion; the C.B.O. estimated $1.2 trillion.

Since then, the administration and Democratic-controlled Congress have enacted a $787 billion stimulus package, though less than half of that will be disbursed this fiscal year, as well as supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bailouts for two automakers.

Also, the recession has reduced anticipated revenue from taxpayers, and increased spending for safety-net programs like jobless benefits and food stamps.

The budget reports underscored another factor that increasingly is driving up deficits: the cost of interest on the expanding federal debt, which is the accumulation of all annual deficits. The debt, which was 33 percent of the G.D.P. when the decade began, would reach 68 percent by 2019.

The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said in a statement, “the Democrats’ out-of-control spending binge is burying our children and grandchildren under a mountain of unsustainable debt.”

Administration officials countered that they were restoring pay-as-you-go budget rules that Republicans had shelved when they were in power, though Democrats would exempt major items. Democrats also said that while they are trying to offset the costs of health care changes, Republicans in the Bush years cut taxes, waged wars and created a Medicare drug benefit, all by deficit financing.

“It’s fairly clear that responsibility for these numbers doesn’t lie with Barack Obama but with the policies that were in place before him,” said Stan Collender, a longtime budget analyst at the consulting firm Qorvis Communications. He said either Mr. Bush or Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival in 2008, would have increased the deficit comparably this year with more war and stimulus spending.

But, he added, “regardless of who’s to blame, it’s undeniably Barack Obama’s problem now.”

The administration, with backing from many economists, has said it would not try to cut the short-term deficits until the economy recovers enough that businesses and consumers resume their spending and investment. But Mr. Orszag said the administration, in next year’s budget, would propose savings other than in health care to arrest long-term deficits.

His office’s budget report also said that “the president is committed to addressing the shortfall in the Social Security system.”

The NYT also reports that as he looks forward to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke’s biggest challenge will be to undo much of what made him a hero during his first term.

In nominating Mr. Bernanke on Tuesday, Mr. Obama praised the Fed chairman for his “bold action and out-of-the-box thinking,” saying it had helped avoid a repeat of the Great Depression.

But most of those bold actions — lending hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and businesses, slashing overnight interest rates to nearly zero, having the Fed almost single-handedly finance the mortgage market — will have to be reversed or rolled back over the next few years.

If the Fed shifts too quickly from the role of savior to that of strict disciplinarian, it risks aborting the recovery and tipping the nation back into a recession, essentially repeating mistakes made in 1937 after the economy had begun to rebound. If the Fed moves too slowly, it risks the kind of intractable inflation it experienced in the 1970s and fueling another bubble.

Compounding the problem is the government’s fiscal woes, made clear by an announcement on Tuesday that the budget deficit would be greater than previously projected.

For the first time in almost 20 years, the Fed may soon have to make unpopular decisions that raise the cost of borrowing even when the economy still feels weak. It has already decided it must tolerate high unemployment, which the Obama administration said Monday would exceed 10 percent, through at least the end of next year. It is already phasing out smaller programs to provide emergency credit, and will have to decide when to scale back bigger ones.

At some point next year, the Fed may well need to raise interest rates — possibly rapidly and sharply, given how far it cut them last year — and in the process raise the cost of things like credit cards, mortgages and business loans.

Any or all of those actions will probably restrain economic growth and keep unemployment rates high, potentially putting the Bernanke Fed on a collision course with the Obama White House.

The federal government’s enormous fiscal problem makes that clash more likely. The White House estimated on Tuesday that the government faced a $9 trillion budget shortfall over the next 10 years. The annual deficits will exceed $1 trillion through 2011, the administration said, and the annual cost of paying interest on the debt will exceed $600 billion in 2019.

The government’s enormous borrowing needs will probably put pressure on the private sector after the economy begins to expand. If that happens, investors may demand higher interest rates on Treasury securities and ultimately drive up borrowing costs for government and businesses alike.

The Fed has faced that kind of conflict before, and the politics were not pretty. Paul A. Volcker, the Fed chairman who tamed inflation in the early 1980s after pushing the federal funds rate to 20 percent, came under attack from businesses, farmers and the White House under President Ronald Reagan.

Alan Greenspanfaced considerable pressure in the early 1990s, when President George H. W. Bush wanted him to cut interest rates more quickly. To this day, many alumni of the Bush administration blame Mr. Greenspan for Mr. Bush’s re-election defeat.

What worries some experts, including Mr. Bernanke, is that the Fed’s expanding role during the financial crisis exposes it to political pressure. Lawmakers, having seen the Fed bail out corporations and extend credit to entire industries, have prodded the central bank to help out other constituencies, like recreational vehicle manufacturers.

At the same time, the Fed’s political critics are multiplying. A bill sponsored by Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, would empower the Government Accountability Office to “audit” the Fed’s decisions on interest rates. Mr. Bernanke and other Fed officials have warned that that would damage the Fed’s independence. Still, the measure has been signed by more than 250 lawmakers in both parties.

Mr. Obama, announcing his decision to nominate Mr. Bernanke for another term, vowed to “continue to maintain a strong and independent Federal Reserve.”

And in supporting Mr. Bernanke, a Republican first appointed by President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama signaled that he was willing to rise above party loyalties.

“Ben approached a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom,” Mr. Obama said.

Unless a disaster erupts out of nowhere, Mr. Bernanke’s Senate confirmation appears certain.

“While I have had serious differences with the Federal Reserve over the past few years, I think reappointing Chairman Bernanke is probably the right choice,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Dodd, who has frequently accused the Fed of failing to rein in reckless mortgage lending, added that Mr. Bernanke had “ultimately demonstrated effective leadership” in the crisis.

At the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last weekend, some analysts criticized Mr. Bernanke for sending contradictory signals.

“The Fed is simultaneously promising to keep interest rates low for an extended period, while also promising to keep inflation from rising,” said Carl E. Walsh, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a paper delivered at the conference.

Fed officials disagreed with his assessment, countering that inflation was, if anything, at risk of being lower than they would like.

“The low interest rates are designed to keep inflation from falling, and falling persistently below where we want them to be,” said Donald L. Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

For the moment, Mr. Bernanke has some breathing room. Even though the federal government is borrowing at a staggering pace, American businesses and consumers have slowed their own borrowing so much that the United States total is down from previous years.

Foreign investors seeking a haven have plowed vast amounts of money into Treasury securities. As a result, interest rates on long-term Treasury bonds, which directly influence interest rates on corporate loans and home mortgages, remain low.

But as business activity picks up around the world, the competition among debt issuers is likely to increase and interest rates could rise. Clashing priorities are not hard to imagine. The Obama White House might want to lift a sluggish recovery by keeping interest rates low. And the Bernanke Fed may want to head off inflation — before it is too late.