Minister’s Speech at Taxation Institute

Here are the slides from a talk the Minister for Finance gave at the Irish Taxation Institute on Friday. Lots of useful material in it, most of which I agree with. Slide 11 is great. It actually says Iceland! (Less fun is the repetition of the de-listing argument as a serious point.)

Commission Approves NAMA

I guess the news that the Commission has approved NAMA (statement here) will get some attention over the next few days but it’s hardly too surprising. EU guidelines allow governments to introduce an asset management agency of this type and it’s very hard to imagine that the Department of Finance had designed something that wasn’t guaranteed to get approved. However, as I’ve noted before, if you read those guidelines closely, they also suggest that the Commission isn’t in favour of packages that are overly friendly to providers of risk capital.  For instance, the guidelines state

(21) As a general principle, banks ought to bear the losses associated with impaired assets to the maximum extent …

(22) Once assets have been properly evaluated and losses are correctly identified, and if this would lead to a situation of technical insolvency without State intervention, the bank should be put either into administration or be orderly wound up, according to Community and national law. In such a situation, with a view to preserving financial stability and confidence, protection or guarantees to bondholders may be appropriate.

(23) Where putting a bank into administration or its orderly winding up appears unadvisable for reasons of financial stability, aid in the form of guarantee or asset purchase, limited to the strict minimum, could be awarded to banks so that they may continue to operate for the period necessary to allow to devise a plan for either restructuring or orderly winding-up. In such cases, shareholders should also be expected to bear losses at least until the regulatory limits of capital adequacy are reached. Nationalisation options may also be considered.

The relatively tough line suggested by these statements has been evident in the Commission’s rulings on payments to subordinated bonds and on various restructuring plans. This approach undoubtedly limits the government’s ability to overpay for the assets going into NAMA and with the assets falling in price with every passing month, the opportunity to keep the banks from actual or near insolvency via overpayment seems to be slipping away.

In my exchanges with our old friend John the Optimist, I have regularly pointed out economists shouldn’t necessarily be judged on their forecasts and I certainly have made calls here that have turned out to be incorrect. However, I will take this opportunity to point out that tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this column that I wrote for the Irish Times. Among other things which I’d still stand by, the column pointed out the following:

In addition to being unfair, it is questionable whether the bad bank proposal could achieve its goal of properly re-capitalising private sector banks. There may be limits on the price the Government can pay for impaired property loans under EU state aid rules. Banks may still have to write down their assets. It is easy to imagine a scenario where banks struggled with weak capital bases even after a bad bank scheme has been put in place.

And here we are.

Electric vehicles next door

From today’s Guardian

The Irish government continues to aim for 10% by 2020, which would be 230,000 or so cars

Criticism of Higher Civil Servant U-Turn Misplaced?

Writing in the Irish Times, Pat McArdle reckons that criticism of the roll back of the cuts to higher civil servant pay is misplaced. Pat’s key argument is as follows:

The Minister appears to have been influenced by a novel aspect of the review process. For the first time, comparison was made not just with the private sector but also with six other European countries. (Of these, only Britain had any kind of bonus scheme.)

Uniquely, the assistant secretaries were found not to be paid more than in the other countries. This was taken into account by the Minister but not by the Review Body.

Here’s the relevant section of the Review Body report:

4.11 The salary for Assistant Secretary places the Irish post behind the equivalent position in the UK, the latter being 10% ahead of its Irish comparator. The salary for the role in the remaining countries is somewhat lower than that of the Irish post. The rate for the equivalent post in Finland, with which the Irish post is banded, is 74% of the Irish rate.

4.12 When the comparison is made on an adjusted income basis, it is found that the Irish post is behind that of four other countries, viz. the UK, which is 102% ahead, Germany, which is 29% ahead, Belgium, which is 6% ahead and the Netherlands, which is 1% ahead. The adjusted income value of the role in Finland is 97% of that for the Irish position.

It is open to question whether the Irish government should be factoring in high local prices levels when setting civil servant pay, particularly since we are aiming to reduce these levels to restore competitiveness.

The report doesn’t explicitly state how much weight it placed on the adjusted versus unadjusted salaries when arriving at its conclusions. It does, however, note that other considerations were taken into account including the economic environment and the current value in Ireland of the security of tenure:

in Report No. 42, we observed that “the value of security of tenure in present economic circumstances must be regarded as less than that which would apply in circumstances of high unemployment.” We also observed that we would be disposed to discount for security of tenure in different economic circumstances. Since we reported in 2007, the economic environment has, as already mentioned, deteriorated significantly and unemployment is at a very high level and still climbing. Security of tenure is, therefore, more valuable now than in 2007.

So the Review Body was balancing a number of different factors when making its decision and not just looking at the adjusted salary.

McArdle may consider recent criticism to be misplaced but he does not explain why on budget day, the Minister announced that his policy in this area would be based on the Review Body’s recommendations based on its balancing of these various factors and then later announced that it would not. Or whether it is wise to abandon the strategy of following the Review Body’s recommendations. Or whether, as a tactical matter, a government that needs to stick to its budgetary strategy is well advised to start taking steps to overturn decisions on budget day. Or whether, if budget day decisions are going to be reversed, it is advisable to focus only on reversing cuts to the salaries of well-paid senior civil servants.

Expert Group on Managing the Household Debt Crisis

The government has appointed an expert group to advise on this important issue (press release here).

What are the suggestions from the readership of this blog for this new initiative?