Update on Current-Year Macroeconomic Projections

The Department of Finance has released an interim update of its macroeconomic projections: you can find it here.   While the upgrade to the real GDP forecast has been well publicised, this release also notes that the decline in the GDP deflator is sharper than expected –  but it does not provide a number for nominal GDP growth.

A more elaborate revision of its forecasts will be published in the Autumn.

NAMA Profit Projection Due to Faulty Haircut Calculation

I had thought there was something a bit odd about how the NAMA business plan extrapolated from the 50% discount applied to the first tranche to come up with its figure for the amount it would be paying for its full portfolio. After all, the fraction of Anglo loans in the first tranche was higher than for the total portfolio and these are likely to be worse in quality than the average loans from AIB or BoI.  Surely, the correct approach would have been to calculate this figure applying the institution-by-institution discount from the first tranche to the total consideration, assuming for example that the first tranche haircut for AIB is the appropriate figure to apply to the rest of AIB’s NAMA portfolio.

So, I did the calculation (here‘s the spreadsheet) and, lo and behold, it projects that NAMA will pay €41.7 billion for the portfolio, not the €40.5 billion they published in the business plan based on extrapolating from the first tranche aggregate discount.

It turns out that Jagdip had done the same calculations before me and discussed them here.  I agree with his comments there and believe this implies some pretty serious questions about the thinking that went into the production of this business plan.

Suffice to say, from here on, I will be assuming that NAMA are going to spend €41.7 billion, not €40.5 billion, and that the baseline case in which full long-term economic value is recovered actually implies a small loss rather than a profit.

Update: As Jagdip points out below, if the base case now becomes a loss of €200 million, this can be made up by not honouring €200 million of subordinated bonds. So the outcome is neither profit or loss. Of course, the “realise ten percent less than LTEV” scenario (known to some as the worst-case scenario) would now be a loss of €2 billion because the original €800 million loss in the business plan already accounted for the sub bonds not being honoured.

AIB and BoI in EU Stress Test

AIB and Bank of Ireland have been included as two of the 91 banks chosen for the stress test being conducted by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors. They don’t do too well in JP Morgan’s version of the test, reported here. Results will be released on 23 July.

Why Larger Losses on NAMA are Likely

Day 2 of the new NAMA business plan and I’m sure people are already a little tired of it as tolerance for all things NAMA has dwindled for most of us. For those still interested, Constantin Gurdgiev has a number of useful calculations in this post.

I’ll conclude on this issue for now by making a few simple points as to why I think the outcome for the taxpayer is likely to be worse than indicated by the plan’s “worst-case scenario’’ of an €800 million loss to be recouped via a levy.

March 31 Commission Letter on Anglo

I can’t add anything to Jagdip’s analysis here but in case you’d missed it, here‘s the European Commission’s March 31 letter to the Irish government on the plans it had submitted at that point for Anglo Irish Bank.