Following up on yesterday’s post about farmers and the IFA, today’s Irish Times reports that the government “is to introduce a statutory code of conduct for grocery retailers and suppliers, in spite of opposition from the bigger operators.” It is also being introduced despite opposition from the ESRI and the Competition Authority. Still, “newly elected president of the IFA, John Bryan, welcomed the announcement.”
Year: 2010
Many congratulations to Kevin O’Rourke on being the first Irish-based recipient of the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant for a project to research the inter-relationships between trade, trade policy and the Great Depression: you can find out more details here.
It was only last night that I heard that Terry Baker, formerly of the ESRI, had died on January 3rd (see http://www.esri.ie/irish_economy/quarterly_economic_commen/ ). Readers of an older vintage will recall his role as chief contributor and editor of the Quarterly Economic Commentary in the 1980s. I worked as a Research Assistant with Terry on a number of these and his modus operandi was to take my numbers, tables and clumsy sentences and magically transform them into the most elegant prose. A pretty mean table tennis player too, if I remember. RIP.
The troubles of developer Bernard McNamara are receiving a lot of coverage: Stories about it in today’s Irish Times are here, here and here, while McNamara’s interview on RTE yesterday is available here (starts 40 minutes in – hearing him blame professional valuers for him paying too much for the Glass Bottle site was priceless).
It is worth noting that, as with Liam Carroll, the fact that Bernard McNamara borrowed some money from outside the network of NAMA-bound banks (in this case, €62.5 million from clients of Davy’s clients) is the only reason that we are able to see the true state of his finances.
And, of course, these stories raise the following question: Since Carroll and McNamara are hopelessly insolvent, who exactly is going to account for the eighty percent of NAMA’s loans that its business plan tells us will be paying back in full?
Barry Eichengreen makes the case here, without having to warn about Western protectionism.