Month: May 2009

Baseline Scenario on US Banks

With AIB and BOI share prices having quadrupled over the past few months thanks to increased hopes of a NAMA-based bailout from the taxpayer, it is interesting to note the similiarities with how the situation has developed in the US, as outlined in this piece by the Baseline Scenario guys.   On why the administration has not shut down insolvent banks, Johnson and Kwak write:

One reason is that taking over banks has somehow been redefined as “nationalization,” with the images it conjures up of forced confiscation of property. Yet there are no guns involved here. Ordinarily, when an investor puts a large amount of new capital into a bank, it gets some measure of control in return. Yet Treasury has bent over backward to minimize its voting shares, beginning with the initial round of recapitalizations and continuing through the latest Citigroup bailout in February.

Perhaps after fighting off charges of “socialism” from the McCain campaign, the Obama administration is wary of any steps that could be described as nationalization. And so instead of insisting on its well-understood duty to shut down failing banks for the public good, it has tied its hands by taking this option off the table.

Irish Economy on Marginal Revolution

Tyler Cowen gives a brief summary of his opinion on where things went wrong

Access to Funds for Nationalised Banks

On last night’s RTE News at 9, David Murphy (fresh from an interview with the Minister for Finance) reported his understanding of the government’s thinking on the banks as follows:

It’s had a good long hard look at the two main banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, and it’s clear AIB has an awful lot of problems and the government may well end up owning 70% of AIB. It did look at nationalising it, I think, and the situation is that if it does go down that road, other lenders in other countries, some of them won’t even lend to banks which are owned by governments. And for that reason, it’s ruled out nationalising AIB.

I am highly sceptical of this line of reasoning.  It is possible that there are financial institutions out there who will (a) Lend directly to the Irish government and (b) Lend to a 70% state-owned bank with a government liability guarantee, and yet who will somehow refuse to consider (c) Lending indirectly to the Irish government via a loan to a 100% state-owned bank.

Continue reading “Access to Funds for Nationalised Banks”

Fiscal Policy: Plans versus Outcomes

Roel Beetsma, Massimo Guiliodori and Peter Wierts have just released a very interesting paper that examines the gap between announced fiscal plans and final fiscal outcomes for a panel of EU member countries.  These authors find that  ‘implementation errors’ are sizeable and in fact fiscal outcomes tend to be more correlated with these errors than with the original plans. Recommending reading: you can download it here.

Goodbye to All That

I’m not a fan of the Ireland Inc line of chat. But the concept has more immediacy and policy relevance since the balance sheet of the main banks has been more or less socialised. Recent discussions about the BOP turn-around, fiscal stabilisation, the rising savings ratio, NAMA, (State purchase of bank assets, risks of over-payment), and about off-balance sheet financing wheezes to sustain construction activity can all usefully be thought about in the context of the national balance sheet.

In addition to fiscal stabilisation, bank re-construction and the restoration of competitiveness, the national balance sheet needs to be shrunken and de-leveraged. By 2007, we had created an economy with an emerging public finance crisis, iffy banks, weakened competitiveness and a balance sheet with too much debt supporting over-valued assets. The balance sheet was in any event too big for comfort, even had the assets (property, equities) turned out OK.

They did’nt, net worth declined sharply in line with asset prices, and credit markets turned nasty. The declining net worth supports a smaller balance sheet anyway, and the nasty credit markets suggest contraction even if net worth was unimpared. So the decline in private sector credit demand, rising savings rate and improving BOP are to be welcomed, and substitution of private with public borrowing to be mourned, in this view. The macroeconomic strategy is to avoid  anything that looks even remotely like a return to 2007. This was not a good place to be. 

The Canadians had a phrase, in the 1980s, for the national inferiority complex occasioned by the decline in the Can $ versus the real thing. They called it ‘parity nostalgia’. There is a mood beginning to emerge, in policy proposals from opposition parties, social partnership talks, lobby group suggestions and from some economists, that I am going to call ’07 Nostalgia’. Things were better back then – we had higher employment, (incuding jobs for graduates!), higher investment, easier credit. So lets have some job creation, off balance sheet spending on infrastructure, banks that can lend again etc etc. This is 07-Nostalgia.

In three or four years time, if we are lucky, we will have an economy which needs to look very different from 2007, the final year of the first credit-fuelled bubble in the State’s history. It should look like this: (i) Government debt ratios stabilised and sovereign credit spreads back to low levels; (ii) competing banks strong enough to lend (a little); (iii) a competitive economy producing more exports, less houses, and (iv) a smaller and less leveraged balance sheet. This economy will inevitably be smaller than 07 for a while, have lower employment, a smaller construction sector, smaller aggregate bank balance sheet, bigger Exchequer debt, lower public spending, higher tax rates and possibly BOP surplusses for a few years.

All policy wheezes emanating from the commentariat over the next few months should be smell-tested for 07 Nostalgia, and rejected at the merest whiff.  We have been there and it did’nt work.