Year: 2010

Innovation Fund Announced

There have been a number of media stories about the government’s latest Smart Economy initative: a new innovation fund featuring public money matched by money from venture capitalists. The Taoiseach was quite bullish about this program on RTE’s The Week in Politics on Sunday night and he has announced it in a speech in New York (press release here.)  The details say that it is a €500 million fund. As I understand it, this is €250 million from the Irish government spread over five years (€50 million per year) matched by private venture capital funds.

The press release tells us that this is a “major boost for enterprise development and job creation.” Well, with GDP for this year projected at €161 billion, venture capital investments of €100 million per year corresponds to six tenths of one percent of GDP. Government initiatives to develop a venture capital industry in Ireland are probably a good idea (I say probably because these initatives are often poorly implemented, in which case they’re a waste of money.)  However, in the grand scheme of things, this cannot be considered a major boost to enterprise. It’s certainly not a major boost to job creation.

Taxes postponed

It now looks as if neither property taxes nor water charges will feature in the next budget. Shifting the tax burden from income to property and resource use would provide a welcome stimulus to the economy. That said, water charges need water meters and property taxes need a valuation database — and the government does not appear to have put much thought into these matters since the Commission on Taxation released its recommendations.

The upshot, of course, is that spending will need to be cut further and that income taxes will stay high for longer.

It Depends on What the Meaning of “Cashflow Generating” Is

Here‘s an interesting article from the Irish Times by Simon Carswell in which NAMA’s senior officials squirm about their changed assessment of the quality of their loan portfolio, blaming most of it on the fragile psychological state of our bankers last Autumn (poor dears). The highlight:

Mr McDonagh said some loans – on top of the 25 per cent that were generating income – were yielding some, if not all interest due, but Nama was still assessing this.

“Twenty-five per cent is cashflow generating – the rest has some cashflow generating,” he said.

It brings to mind our friend Maurice O’Leary’s favourite quote:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

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.