Morgan Kelly has released a new working paper “The Irish Credit Bubble” – it is available here.
Month: December 2009
Simon Carswell reported last Saturday on an email from Steven Seelig, who holds the position of Advisor in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, to the Department of Finance commenting on the draft NAMA legislation. The Irish Times obtained this email, along with other communications on NAMA, via a Freedom of Information request and there has been some discussion of it in the comments on this site.
Because the newspaper article only partly reported the text of the email, I asked Simon Carswell would he be willing to pass it on and he has kindly agreed. So here’s the full text of the communication. (Here’s the draft of the legislation he was commenting on )
For conspiracy theorists, the apparently blacked-out word on the second page is “excellent” – Simon had highlighted it in the copy he scanned.
The CSO has released a new and comprehensive survey on earnings patterns in the economy: you can find the release here. The new Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey (EHECS) results are comparable across sectors and include more detail on components of earnings and labour costs than is currently available. The data show interesting sectoral variation in earnings patterns and the relative roles of adjustment in hourly earnings and total hours worked in determining aggregate earnings dynamics in each sector. Still, the survey still only relies on aggregated data for each participant in the survey, such that it does not reveal the precise earnings dynamics for specific worker types or occupations.
Congratulations to Oonagh Smyth and the team at Prime Time Investigates for producing an excellent documentary on what went wrong with the Irish banks. The programme, which has insightful contributions from a number of people including Governor Honohan, is now available online here. The programme is likely to increase the pressure on the government to have an official inquiry.