Paul Gorecki has a great new paper: A Code of Practice for Grocery Goods Undertakings and An Ombudsman: How to Do a Lot of Harm by Trying to Do a Little Good.
The subtitle is a nice summary.
(It has been suggested by some on this blog that the ESRI has no interest in regulation, turning a blind eye to unsavourary practices in many sectors. This is not true. We just wish we had the resources to do more in this area.)
The new rankings are out. All Irish universities are up. TCD at 43, UCD at 89.
To pre-empt some critique: No ranking is perfect, but each imperfect ranking correlates with each other imperfect ranking. Two universities in the top 100 is not at all bad for a country that has far less than 2/100 people in the OECD, let alone the world.
Michael Burke has an analysis of the nature of Ireland’s economic crisis in the Socialist Economic Bulletin which is a blog published by Ken Livingstone. His account of how we got into our economic crisis is by and large a coherent one (an unfortunate typo suggesting that NAMA proposes to pay €54bn for assets worth €77bn notwithstanding) although one can quibble with some of his judgements. For example, his claim that the April 2009 budget was regressive is not supported by the results reported by Tim Callan using the ESRI tax-benefit model on this blog. One point he highlights to which I had seen little reference before is the implication of the collapse in domestic asset values for our net external debt position, given that much of this borrowing was financed by foreign bondholders.
In contrast to the detailed analysis of past history, his proposals for responding to the crisis are little more than sketched out and are thus less convincing. Competitiveness is not seen as a problem despite his clear analysis that a big contribution to our current trade surplus is the collapse in imports of investment goods and that our relatively good export performance is heavily influenced by the special circumstances of the dominant chemicals sector. One proposal is to delay fiscal adjustment because of its deflationary consequences (a demand already being made by the trade union movement). Another is to “take control” of leading property and construction companies presumably in order to restore economic activity in construction, although why this would make sense given the substantial over-capacity that exists in both residential and commercial property is not clear. He also proposes nationalisation of the banks and repudiation of some or all of their accumulated debts, policies which have been debated and which have found some support on this blog.
I have noted before that even if one sets aside issues relating to fairness and cost to the Irish taxpayer, I don’t believe that NAMA will achieve what the government states is its purpose, namely “getting credit flowing again.”
In this context, it is interesting to see that there is a debate this week in the US, prompted by this government report, which focuses on, among other things, whether TARP increased lending at assisted institutions. Chicago’s Casey Mulligan writes about it here.
The report’s conclusions, on page 30, noted that there were US government officials who had concerns about the health of some of the banks being assisted and that statements that TARP was going to get lending going again created “unrealistic expectations.”
James Kwak of Baseline Scenario responds here that the politicians knew full well that TARP probably wouldn’t increase lending—that it was more an emergency measure to keep the banking system afloat—and that these claims were made simply to obtain the necessary political support for an unpopular measure. Sound familiar?