Year: 2010

Administrators Appointed to Quinn Insurance

RTE and the Irish Times are reporting that administrators have been appointed to Quinn Insurance. RTE report

Mr Justice John Cooke made the order following an application by lawyers on behalf of the Financial Regulator.

The application was made under the 1983 Insurance act.

The court heard the Regulator took this action following serious concerns about the way the group was managing its affairs.

The Times reports

The court heard that the company had moved from a position where it had an excess of assets over liabilities of more than €200 million to a position where it had €200 million of liabilities over assets.

As if today wasn’t busy enough already.

Macroeconomics of Public Sector Reform

Without knowing the details of today’s deal, it is still worth thinking about the macroeconomics of public sector reform.  I will take it that the deal delivers widespread productivity growth in the public sector.

All else equal, an improvement in the quality or output of public services should be valued by the population. It is desirable that this be reflected in the measurement of GDP and various countries are attempting to capture quality and output measures for public services to this end. (The alternative is to measure public sector output by the volume of inputs – but this cannot capture productivity growth.)  The value to the population of extended opening hours, for example, should be considerable.  It would be helpful if Ireland made efforts to improve the measurement of the public sector contribution to GDP.

Next, for given levels of output and quality, an improvement in productivity means that the public sector requires fewer workers.  This expands the supply of labour to the private sector.  This will benefit private-sector enterprises, including via the attendant downward pressure on wage levels.  A cautionary note:  the initial impact of technological progress can be contractionary, since rigidities in the labour market may mean that it takes time for private-sector employment to expand to absorb the extra supply of workers.

Next, the financial savings from the reduction in public sector numbers [and/or the elimination/reduction of premium payments for some types of overtime] can be allocated in several ways:  (a) reduce the deficit; (b) increase the provision of public services [equivalently, avoid service reductions] ; (c) reduce taxes [equivalently, avoid tax increases beyond what is inevitable]; or (d) increase public sector pay levels [equivalently, partial or full restoration of previous pay cuts].

It is currently unclear about the intended allocation of savings across (a) through (d).

I further note that uncertainty in the provision of public services is damaging for the population, such that the commitment to avoid strike action and other types of service interruption is very welcome.

Finally, as part of the overall package, a commitment to no further pay reductions is also welcome by providing certainty to public sector workers  – this should reduce the level of excess precautionary savings. (I made this point back in January 2009 in my paper “A New Fiscal Strategy for Ireland”  –  the ideal time profile for pay cuts is to make a significant initial cut but not to pursue a sequential process of gradual pay cuts.) Since there are likely still significant pay premia for many public sector occupations, it will be important to closely monitor future public pay dynamics by reference to labour market conditions across the economy.

Progressive taxation of incineration

The Minister for the Environment has made another announcement on municipal waste policy.

There are two components. One is not new: There is to be a cap on incineration. There is no rationale for creating an artificial scarcity, as explained by Gorecki and Lyons. Using both price and quantity instruments is double regulation. Tinbergen (1952) shows that this is unnecessarily costly.

The new element in the latest announcement is that the incineration levy is not constant, but increases with the size of the incinerator. Both the ESRI and the Eunomia report recommend an incinerator levy, albeit at different levels. However, they recommend the same levy, per tonne, regardless of the size of the incinerator — although one could argue that larger incinerators burn cleaner and therefore should have a lower levy.

There is no economic or environmental rational for putting a higher levy on larger incinerators.

UPDATE: Story in the Irish Times

UPDATE2: PJ Rudden says the proposed levies may be illegal. I’ve heard say that it would be anti-competitive to put one levy on a small incinerator in Cork and another levy of a big incinerator in Dublin, but as inter-county trade in waste will be verboten too, I’m not convinced that that argument holds.

UPDATE3: RTE looked at the letters between the City Manager of Dublin and the Minister for the Environment; they are not particularly friendly to one another.

Public Sector Deal

The main points are summarised in this IT article.

Super Tuesday Leaks

Tomorrow we should finally see a resolution of much of the uncertainty that has been hanging over the Irish banking system. We are being told that the estimated prices for NAMA transfers will be announced, as well as the capital requirements set by the Central Bank and the new legal framework for the Central Bank and Financial Regulator.

With the news so soon to be released, there is little point in me speculating as to what is going to happen. What I would flag, however, is that there is something of a disconnect between two sets of statements doing the rounds in today’s media coverage.

First, there has clearly been widespread leaking that the NAMA loan transfers will see some banks taking considerably larger writedowns than had previously been expected. For instance, in the Irish Independent, Emmet Oliver writes that “AIB is set to be hit with a discount of up to 40pc”.

Second, much of the coverage mentions the idea of the state owning 70 percent of AIB and 40 percent of BoI. See, for instance, here and here. And note that Emmet Oliver’s full sentence is “AIB is set to be hit with a discount of up to 40pc, making majority State control all but inevitable” and he mentions the Minister’s “plan to take a 70pc stake in the lender.”

The disconnect is that these two sets of figures don’t seem to add up. There is nothing new about the idea of the state potentially owning 70 percent of AIB. Even based on previous expectations for NAMA discounts, this was always a possibility. For instance, I’m looking now at a Davy stockbrokers report from April of last year that projected a base case of the government owning 78% of AIB.

However, it is hard to reconcile the continuing circulation of the same ownership statistics as before with the new information (if such it is) on discounts and also on capital levels.

To give a concrete example, AIB’s annual report says that it had €9.5 billion in core equity capital at the end of 2009. This included the government’s €3.5 billion in preference shares (this isn’t core equity in my book, or most people’s, and it is likely to be converted to ordinary equity.) So that leaves €6 billion in private core equity capital. AIB is supposed to be transferring €24 billion in loans to NAMA. Forty percent of €24 billion is €9.6 billion.

So, do the math on this and you’d probably come to a different conclusion about ownership percentages than have been flagged by the media. One way or another, we’ll find out tomorrow, but today’s leaks are confusing, perhaps deliberately so.

Update: This post should have been clearer that AIB’s annual report already allows for €4.1 billion in provisions for losses on loans going into NAMA. So the calculations would involve an additional €5.5 billion in losses over and above that. With half a billion in equity capital and the need to get up to a core equity ratio of eight percent, the 70 percent state ownership doesn’t add up. Still, perhaps I’ll see tomorrow how it’s going to add up and still end up with the 70 percent outcome.