With extracts carried in today’s Sunday Business Post, IrishCentral.com carries a very extensive interview by Niall O’Dowd with David Drumm here.
Month: November 2011
The slides are here. The draft paper is here.
See also Paul Krugman on Hedge Fund Ireland.
Charles Forelle writing in the WSJ points out some of the risks peripheral nations like Ireland and Portugal still pose for the Euro area, including the chances of our export-led growth strategy collapsing if the international economy begins to sputter, and the possibility of debt forgiveness and/or restructuring. From the piece:
Beside the government debt, Irish households are also heavily indebted—household debt hit €185 billion last year, or 119% of GDP. That’s down from the €203 billion peak in 2008, but it’s still more than twice household income.
“We are going to have to make a choice: What do we want to restructure”—government debt or household debt? asks Constantin Gurdgiev, an adjunct lecturer in finance at Trinity College Dublin and head of research for St. Columbanus AG, an asset manager.
Much of the debt is mortgage-related, and the government has faced intense pressure to craft a mortgage-relief program for homeowners, something it has resisted. Data show rising mortgage arrears and rising levels of negative equity among borrowers.
It’s a risky move. If too many borrowers with negative equity “strategically default,” the cost becomes huge for Irish banks, which would then have to turn to the government for more help—in effect, household debt would be transferred to the government.
“At a macro level, a debt-forgiveness scheme makes sense because people will be consuming rather than paying their debt,” says Philip Lane, professor of international macroeconomics at Trinity College Dublin. “But the scheme has to be surgically targeted so only the people most in need use it.”
The FT reports on UK developments here.
Eight academic economists have left Dublin in recent months or will leave shortly. That may seem like a small number, but there are only 200 or so academic economists in the country. They all have moved / will move to warmer places: Stirling (2.0K warmer on average than Dublin), Brighton (2.2K), Oxford (2.2K), Canberra (3.4K), Melbourne (5.3K) and Lisbon (7.0K). Dublin economists thus disregard the opinion of the European Union that a climate change of 2.0K is dangerous.
Between 1998 and 2009, intra-union migration has been towards warmer places. The average migrant in the EU experienced a warming of 0.6K. The average masks a wide spread. About 10% of migrants stayed in roughly the same climate, 17% experienced a cooling of 2K or less, and 16% a cooling of more than 2K. 24% experienced a warming of less than 2K, and 33% a warming of more than 2K. 450,000 people opted to live in a climate that is more that 5K warmer than what they were used to.
Obviously, one cannot compare the individual impact of moving to a warmer climate with the impact of global warming, but at the same time it is clear that both Dublin economists specifically and intra-European migrants generally do not object to a warmer environment.
City climate data from World Guides. Country climate data from the Climate Research Unit. Migration data from EuroStat, for Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom.