The Economics Focus slot in this week’s Economist covers various policy interventions that can help to deflate property bubbles – you can read it here.
The comedy of errors continues.
From a recent Irish Times article by the forensic and understated Colm Keena: “Lenihan said he was going to seek a cap of 500,000 euro on the salaries of the chief executives of Bank of Ireland and AIB… When the then governor of the Bank of Ireland wrote to Lenihan about Boucher’s pay arrangements, he suggested pay of 500,000 euro and a “pension cash allowance” of 123,000 euro. The Minister did not want the new chief executive getting any allowance that had been criticised in the (Covered Institution Remuneration Oversight) Committee report, and the amount ended up being rolled into a salary of 623,000 euro. Ironically, this appears to have been an improvement in Boucher’s terms, as the salary amount is pensionable, while the cash allowance is not”.
There are a variety of perspectives on the EU bailout of Greek sovereigns, but from the perspective of an academic economist (at least this one) the proposed bailout has some potential flaws that are quite fundamental.
There has been much discussion of the potential role of a common euro area bond – Bruegel have released a paper analysing such ‘blue bonds’; you can download it here.
Ken Rogoff reflects on the European sovereign debt crisis in this FT article.