This seems like bad news and hardly the kind of response the government would have been hoping for after its stress test report and recapitalisation commitments. What I don’t know is whether this makes much difference at this point in relation to corporate deposits. Is it the case that the large deposits that were going to be pulled are already gone or is this downgrade going to trigger further withdrawals?
Month: April 2011
Today’s article by Wolfgang Munchau is a summary of the dinner talk that he gave at last week’s EUI workshop on sovereign default. A very interesting counterpart to Munchau’s article is this paper by veteran sovereign debt lawyer Lee Buchheit (lead negotiator for Iceland! with its creditors) and Mitu Gulati (Duke law professor) which discusses other scenarios for Greek debt. Buchheit and Gulati gave very interesting presentations on this and other relevant topics at the EUI conference (a podcast is due to go up this week and I will pass on the link when it does). It perhaps goes without saying that this paper has a lot of relevance for Ireland.
Wolfgang Münchau outlines one possible scenario in today’s FT: a crisis-driven leap towards eurobonds, in the most toxic political circumstances possible.
Minister Brendan Howlin on RTE’s The Week in Politics has said the government are preparing a “stimulus package that is fiscally neutral”. As a macroeconomist, this strikes me as a pretty strange concept. Pretty much everywhere else in the world, a stimulus package implies a set of measures that cut taxes or raise spending and are not “fiscally neutral.”
Still, one can hardly argue that the current set of tax and spending policies are optimised to generate as much employment as possible, so it may be possible to adjust policies to generate additional employment and I’d be interested in people’s suggestions for fiscally neutral measures that can boost employment. But shouldn’t we stop calling such changes “stimulus packages”?