Eddie Hobbs

[citation needed] In 1995 Hobbs was made a non-executive director in the financial services firm Taylor Asset Management but resigned from it and TIPS in January 1996.

[6] Hobbs himself was never implicated in any issues relating to company affairs and in 2007 he was exonerated by the Irish High Court and praised by the presiding judge for showing "efficiency and determination and for not standing idly" when he pursued Taylor's activities from 1995 to 1996.

[citation needed] Hobbs' complaint to the EU Taxation Commission that the Irish tax code was being adjusted to create competitive advantage to domestic Irish funds in breach of The Treaty of Rome, resulted in the Commission writing to Finance Minister McCreevy who adjusted the new gross roll-up tax regime to all OECD funds.

[citation needed] When Minister McCreevy announced the SSIA savings scheme, Hobbs launched the Consumers Association of Ireland 'Savermark' standard that required banks to link deposit interest to the ECB base rate movements to prevent margins widening.

An outspoken populist critic of the vested interests in Ireland, especially the producer groups who "control the country", Hobbs has often repeated that "There's one game in town: development."

In his 2006 book, LOOT, he advised readers to reduce debt to under 50% of assets, move to AAA rated banks, exit equities, buy bonds and own some gold, two years later the global financial crisis emerged.

In October 2009 he launched Energise – How to Survive and Prosper in the Coming Age of Scarcity, High Inflation and Peak Oil as an eBook from his website, all profits from which go to the Irish children's charity, The Jack & Jill Foundation.

Hobbs directed the letter campaign to urge then-President McAleese to refer the Act to the Supreme Court on the basis that it was not taxing legislation but interference with property rights.

In a controversial 2012 article in The Wall Street Journal, Hobbs described the Irish Government as a captive: "So while Time magazine and others eulogize the plucky leader of the Irish people, the truth is that Enda Kenny leads a Vichy government—captive externally to creditors that still insist on loading bank debt onto the sovereign, and internally to a tribe of insiders led by union godfathers in a deal that protects the government's own excessive pay and pensions while bankers lean over its shoulders to rewrite insolvency laws.

Fearing that money printing operations would lead to an inflation break out, he advised mortgage holders with high debt to income to buy certainty and fix rates.

Two and a half years later the company was liquidated after experiencing heavy losses in the Detroit housing refurbishing market following a valuation slump in 2016 -2019 caused by a lead water crisis that erupted in Flint to the north.

In the spring of 2015, Hobbs was a co-founder of Renua, a new political party formed by breakaway members of Fine Gael, most prominently Lucinda Creighton who served as its first leader.

Hobbs resigned from Renua in June 2016[16] after the party failed to get any its candidates elected in 2016, including its leader Lucinda Creighton, despite securing 2.5% of the vote and Government funding, one of its key targets.

[17] In 2019 Hobbs fundraised and sponsored a paper from Professor Cal Muckley of University College Dublin advocating for a Social Progress Index for Ireland.

[citation needed] In 2013 Hobbs helped set up Own Our Oil, a citizens advocacy group focused on overhauling Ireland's oil and gas licensing regime,[20] and made a pre-Budget submission in July 2013 calling for the sale of licences to be treated like development land rezoning, and subject to Capital Gains Tax of 66% to recover economic rents to the Irish people.

[21] In March 2014 Hobbs launched Own Our Oil – the Fight for Ireland's Economic Freedom, a compilation of essays from a multi-discipline team of writers covering, planning, environment, taxation, strategy, industry, geology, and history, commencing a national public briefing campaign.

[22] The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum replied that comparing the Holocaust to COVID-19 vaccines "that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline".

On 20 May 2024 Hobbs read The Killarney Declaration about rising totalitarianism outside the Global Economic Summit addressed by the Director General of the World Health Organisation, https://www.mayonews.ie/news/comment---opinion/1515219/de-facto-eddie-hobbs-and-the-killarney-declaration.html