Month: April 2009

IMF on Costs of Financial Stabilisation

The Irish Times lead story cites the IMF’s Global Financial Stability report as having the following sentence: “The United States, United Kingdom and Ireland face some of the largest potential costs of financial stabilisation (12 to 13 per cent of GDP) given the scale of mortgage defaults.” It turns out, however, that the IT was a little behind on a (fairly silly) controversy about this sentence.

It turns out that the IMF’s cost estimates are not new at all but actually first appeared on page 17 of this report released on March 6, which was written as a companion to this report on the outlook for public finances around the world.  The March 6 paper reports a cost figure of 13.9 percent of Irish GDP, which amounts to €24 billion.  Table 4 also reports the cost for the UK at 9.1 percent of GDP.

For this reason, there was a bit of a flap over this when the BBC reported the 12-13 percent figure, with the UK Treasury pointing out correctly that the sentence and its accompanying table were wrong.  The version of the report on the website no long contains the parenthetical “(12 to 13 per cent of GDP)” that the Irish Times had quoted and the table has been altered—I think Ireland may have been listed in the original Table 1.8 but we are not now.  In any case, you can find the original source of the calculations from the above link.

So, not the IMF’s finest hour.  However, beyond the silliness, it is clear that the IMF’s assessment of the likely costs of financial sector support measures to the Irish taxpayer does not fit well with the government’s current stance that “under extreme stress scenarios” BOI only need €3.5 billion in additional capital, while AIB only need €5 billion.

The Fed’s Exit Strategy

The Fed is using an impressive range of firepower to counter the greatest deflationary threat since the Great Depression.   With such massive injections of liquidity, however, it is not surprising that leading figures are already debating exit strategies and the extent of the longer-term inflationary threat.   It is a fascinating debate to watch. 

John Taylor worried in the FT last month that “extraordinary measures have the potential to change permanently the role of the Fed in harmful ways.”   He said, “The success of monetary policy during the great moderation period of long expansions and mild recessions was not due to discretionary interventions, but to following predictable policies and guidelines that worked.” 

Writing this week in the FT, Martin Feldstein is also anxiously looking ahead:  “[W]hen the economy begins to recover, the Fed will have to reduce the excessive stock of money and, more critically, prevent the large volume of excess reserves in the banks from causing an inflationary explosion of money and credit.  This will not be an easy task since the commercial banks may not want to exchange their reserves for the mountain of private debt that the Fed is holding and the Fed lacks enough Treasury bonds with which to conduct ordinary open market operations. It is surprising that the long-term interest rates do not yet reflect the resulting risk of future inflation.”

Robert Hall and Susan Woodward strike a more optimistic note in a piece on the VOX site:  “[T]he Fed can control inflation by varying the interest rate it pays (or charges) banks on their reserve holding. Consequently, the Fed’s exit strategy need not be constrained by concerns about inflation – reserve interest-rate policy can take care of inflation, but the Fed should publically announce this policy.”

A Comparison of Tax Systems

DG-ECFIN of the European Commission has released this interesting report on the structure of tax systems in the member countries: you can download it here.

AIB Re-Cap Announcements

So where does the substance of the AIB announcement leave us?  As has often been the case with the government’s approach to the banking crisis, this pushes us one step closer to some kind of resolution, while still maintaining lots of uncertainty as to what that resolution will look like. 

Continue reading “AIB Re-Cap Announcements”

Goodwill Hunting at AIB

I’ll write a bit more later on the substance of the announcements today from AIB and the Department of Finance. However, I thought I’d first discuss an aspect of today’s developments that hasn’t been discussed in most of the press reports. Together with the Minister for Finance (with whom they have good reason not to disagree) AIB have “formed a view” that they need to have an extra €1.5 billion in Tier 1 capital.

Those who followed AIB and BOI’s fruitless attempts to raise equity in recent months were probably surprised to hear that rather than just announce that AIB was taking an extra €1.5 billion from the government, the bank stated that it was planning to raise these funds itself.  Most media stories have focused on how AIB can achieve this by selling its minority stake in M&T, an American bank, and perhaps also selling its stake in a Polish bank.

Now here’s where it gets tricky. RTE and other media outlets have reported this as a simple story of “bank short of funds raises funds by selling assets.” The problem is folks, that plausible as this may sound, that’s not the story at all.

Continue reading “Goodwill Hunting at AIB”