The Labour Party is hosting a conference on Saturday, 21 February in Dublin to discuss solutions to Ireland’s economic and banking problems. A link to the programme can be found here. I post this notice because I think some visitors to this site might be interested in the event, not because of any political allegiances.
Month: February 2009
The sa volume of retail sales peaked in Q4 2008. This morning’s release for December completes the 2008 picture. There were qoq falls from Q1 to Q4 of 1.8%, 3.3%, 1% and 2.2%. The Dec figure was 8% below Dec 2008.
The quarterly national accounts, available only to Q3 2008 anyway, do not give the income table, and we can only guess at the intra-year patterns. If consumption has followed retail sales volume, there must have been a sharp increase in the savings rate through 08. Household income cannot have fallen anything like 8%, and even in Q4 it is doubtful if the income decline was as much as the 2.2% quarterly fall in retail sales volume. The direct tax increases had not kicked in, and many enjoyed nominal pay rises from September as consumer prices began to fall, offsetting the income loss from employment contraction. Household income will possibly fall more rapidly in Q1 2009, since unemployment seems to be rising faster; direct tax hikes are kicking in; and there seems to be a pay-reduction round going on in the private sector. If the savings rate continues to rise, the implication could be dire retail volumes for a while yet.
Here’s a question: the figures coming out since year-end have been pretty poor overall, suggesting that activity is declining even faster than feared. Does this mean that the downturn could be shorter? Is it the case that there is a given (given by world trade volumes, real exchange rate and competitiveness) macro-correction of x% to be endured, but x does not get bigger just because the economy gets through it faster?
The two main Irish bank shares fell back again today following the announcement of the details of the recapitalization — down 16 and 14 per cent respectively. There could be lots of reasons. To begin with there was the extraneous factor of the back-to-back deposits between Anglo and ILP mentioned in a previous post. ILP fell back 15 per cent as well.
Then there is the possibility that shareholders expected a more lenient deal? But how lenient could that have been? The interest rate on the preference shares is stiff enough, but not out of line with prevailing practice in other countries and anyway was well-flagged.
To all intents and purposes, however, the share prices are close to zero — down over 95 per cent on their peak.
My purpose in writing, though, is to point out that even though the preference shares are senior to equity, an injection sufficient to assure solvency going forward could nevertheless have been expected to lift ordinary share prices.
I suspect this is not a well-known effect. Permit me to present a very simple model.
Thus, suppose that there are just three periods. For convenience, assume our bank begins with zero capital.
In period 1, the government decides the amount S it will inject through purchase of preference shares.
In period 2 we discover the true state of the world, i.e. the size of the loan losses (H high in the bad state, L low in the good state). If the losses exceed the funds the government injected, then the bank is liquidated and the shareholders get nothing; If the losses are equal to or less than injection, then the bank continues in operation.
In period 3 the bank, if still in operation, earns franchise profits Z on the rest of its business. It is then wound up; the government receives its injection back if possible. Any surplus goes to the shareholders.
Clearly, if the values H and L are known and if the government injects any amount equal to or less than L, the market value of the shares at the end of period 1 is zero. (Of course, the analysis assumes rational market expectations.)
If the government injects more than that, the market value of the shares at the end of period 1 is p*max{0, (Z-L)}, where p is the probability of the good state. A longer expression gives the share value if the injection S is higher than H.
The point is that even an injection S that is only sufficient to ensure the bank’s survival in the good state will, when announced, increase the market value of the shares.
The Irish Government injection of yesterday was insufficient to do that.
ICTU has released its 10 point set of recommendations: you can find the document here.
I am interested in the readership’s comments on this document, which will be an important input into the next round of social partnership talks.
There are seasonals in the price indices, and they happen to matter when comparing January with December. Both HICP and CPI ‘should’ fall by about 0.7% in Jan. HICP sa changed little from Oct to Nov, but dipped about 0.5% in Dec. It has dipped about 0.1% further sa in Jan. CPI, mainly due to declining mortgage costs, fell almost 1% sa in both Nov and Dec, and has fallen a further 1% in Jan. The main difference between the two is owner-occupied housing costs, excluded from the HICP. It would be nuts to annualise the sa CPI fall of the last three months, would imply minus 12% or more for the year. Interest rates can decline only a little further.
The annual % change in CPI is now about zero. But the last three months sa has shown an average CPI drop of 1% per month. The (preferable, in my view) HICP seems to be dropping about 0.3% per month for the last two months, would give an annual fall about 4%. The twelve-month HICP figure (meaningless) is still showing +1.1%. I reckon, for what it is worth, that HICP could begin to drop (sa) a bit quicker than CPI over the next few months. There is more sterling pass-through on the way, but maybe not much more from ECB.
These January figures are consistent with recent forecasts of significant price declines for 2009 over 2008. Numbers like minus 3 or 4% for 2009 over 2008 are plausible, even though it is early days. There are obvious implications for indirect tax revenue, and for informally index-linked income variables.