Anyone who doubts the severity of this crisis should take a look at this chart.
Month: October 2009
These are now out. The general government balance for 2009 is now projected at minus 12 percent of GDP.
This statement was published yesterday (hat tip to Jonathan Westrup) and contains many proposals for developing regulatory capacity in Ireland. Amongst the most interesing are the proposal to increase the transparency of strategy and results for regulators and to enhance the monitoring capacity of departments over agencies, new networking arrangements between departments and agencies (an annual forum) and between agencies and stakeholders and increased support (within current resources, of course) for research and training in regulation. The statement is underpinned by a report on economic regulation in Ireland completed earlier in the year by the Economists Intelligence Unit and also published yesterday here.
The CSO has released a multivariate analysis of the 2007 National Employment Survey which shows broadly similar results to the recent ESRI study (which used data from the 2003 and 2006 surveys). I imagine that next week’s ESRI seminar should stimulate some interesting debate on this important topic.
With the Lisbon debate now over bar the voting and counting, I’m hoping that despite widespread exhaustion with the topic of NAMA, we can now have a debate about this issue that doesn’t involve misleading spin about IOUs, free money from the ECB, support from international organisations and the like. It’s with that in mind that I have written this article for today’s Irish Times.
Reading it now, the tone seems a bit more strident than my usual approach but I think it’s important that misleading spin be seen for what it is so that we can return the focus to the basic questions of correctly diagnosing the problems with our banking sector and designing fair and efficient ways to deal with them.
For that reason, I don’t plan to engage in a comment-fest here on the various distractions that have been been central elements of the government’s PR campaign on NAMA. If you don’t agree with me about free money, IOUs, ECB, international organisations, or frogs and locusts, fine, but I’ve said my piece on these and don’t see much benefit from repeating myself any more.