The Irish Economy

Below are links to the unemployment session materials so that this thread can be used for thoughts people have on the contents of the session.

Slides and audio podcasts from Friday’s session are available at the following link. Let us know if there are any problems. Some technical glitches with the policy evaluation session but we will put material up later.  We are working on the videos and they will be available at some stage but the audio and slides should be fine in terms of getting complete content. As is the norm, we dont include the Q+A components of the sessions. The hashtag is still ieconf for people commenting on twitter. It would be good if different posters started threads on specific sessions and a couple of people have already committed to do this later. Perhaps use this thread if general comments about the conference or suggestions for future events.

Information on the Treaty agreed last night by 25 EU member states is available here. Somewhat remarkably, given that draft texts have been circulating for weeks, there is no version of the agreed text.  Anyone out there have a link?

I’d note that the materials released all point to the need to implement the structural deficit rule at “constitutional or equivalent level” while the Independent reports that “preferably constitutional” is in the final draft.

If indeed it turns out that we need a referendum, this is a pretty bad start.

Update: The EU Council have finally released the text here. Anyway, “preferably constitutional” has been retained, which begs the question as to what van Rompuy and his officials were up to with their statements about “constitutional or equivalent level”.

Eoin Reeves and Dónal Palcic write in today’s Irish Times on the issue of privatisation, and they don’t pull their punches. From the piece:

Not only is there a lack of clarity about the companies to be sold and the timing of any sales, but it has also emerged that there are significant differences between the Government and the troika on the role privatisation should play in contributing to any economic recovery. These differences do not bode well in terms of making the best decisions about the future ownership of critical infrastructure industries.

At this stage, two key points of difference between the Government and the troika can be discerned. First, the drip-feed of information provided during the latest visit indicates that the troika views privatisation as a structural reform issue that should be implemented to improve the overall competitiveness of the economy. The Government, meanwhile, appears to be focused on privatisation as a means of raising exchequer revenues.

The second point of difference concerns how the proceeds from privatisation should be used. Whereas the Government wants to direct revenues towards job creation, the troika views proceeds as a means of paying down the national debt.

The troika’s view of privatisation as a tool for reducing costs and improving competitiveness is an orthodox proposition that is traditionally associated with multilateral organisations such as the International Monetary Fund but it is one that can be readily challenged.

Palcic and Reeves finish by making an important point about the dangers of short term political thinking applied to long term strategic assets. This problem is rarely discussed, as far as I can see, in Irish public policy. Hopefully we’ll see some more discussion in the comments about this problem.

“Europe would not function any more if it changed course after every election.”

(Angela Merkel, quoted here, poo-pooing the notion that French voters might have any say over whether the next government ratifies this treaty or not.)

Words fail me, but they’re hardly necessary,

This World Bank report was written as part of the first Polish Presidency of the European Union Council. The report was launched on January 24 2012 in Brussels. I feel it is a good approach to take a European View of the Crisis.  We will see solutions, and problems, differently if they wear our EU hat.
The press release says: The report documents the impressive achievements of the European growth model over the last 50 years. Accounting for the stresses it is experiencing and assessing the longer-term challenges that Europe will face, the report then evaluates the six principal components of the model: Trade, Finance, Enterprise, Innovation, Labour, and Government. It finds that the European growth model has been a powerful engine for economic convergence, helping developing countries in Europe catch up to their richer neighbours and become high-income economies. But recent  changes in and outside Europe necessitate change. The report proposes the adjustments needed to make trade and finance work even better, to encourage enterprise and innovation in parts of Europe which have begun to lag, and address shortcomings in the functioning of labour markets and governments. The changes proposed would restart the European convergence machine, make Europe’s enterprises competitive, and help Europeans afford the highest standards of living in the world.
I was a co-author on Chapter 7 (Government), written by Kaspar Richter, Ewa Korczyc, and Paul Walsh.  My personal view:  Clearly the Economist has picked up on the magnitude of the debt problem facing the EU relative to the rest of the World.  It is also important to note that the size and structure of government spending, particularly social spending, while generous compared to the rest of the world, exhibits huge differences across EU member states. The current debate around the fiscal compact is about aggregate fiscal deficits and debt dynamics. Yet the degree to which member states are so different in the level and structure of their social spending is not really appreciated.  Tax harmonisation is one thing but maybe some thought should be given to divergences in social spending.  As EU citizens facing a potential Fiscal Union, a movement to Eurobonds and increased Political Reform, should Education, Health and Social Welfare supports not be the same for all? Depending on where you live in Europe, and your demographic, and now your debt level, your entitlements can be very different. Some states can deliver a high level of public service and economic growth, even in a high taxation environment, others seem to struggle.  Many countries, and the EU as a whole, seem to need a good deal of Political Reform.   All these good ideas around growth, and reform of taxation and spending, are all fine but can only be implemented with a major restructuring of Political Institutions at the National, EU level and Global Level.  The lack and poor quality of Political Institutions at every level can be blamed for our current situation. Reform of Political Institutions needs to happen to get us back on track.  Ireland can contribute at every level in this reform process. 
Report can be found on the below.
http://www.worldbank.org/goldengrowth

Here are some quick snapshots from my presentation at Friday’s conference in Croke Park.   Some background information can be found in the following:

• Patterns of Investment
• Investment, Depreciation and the Capital Stock
• Investment in EU Countries

From 1983 to 2010 capital expenditure averaged nearly 12% of gross voted expenditure.  In 2011, capital expenditure was 8.1% of gross voted expenditure, the lowest since 1992.

For the four years from 2012 to 2015 it is planned that capital expenditure will be 6.4% of gross voted expenditure.  For every €100 of voted expenditure, €93.60 will go to the current budget (transfer payments, public sector pay, and other non-pay expenditure on goods and services) and €6.40 will go to the capital budget.  Would this satisfy the equi-marginal principle?

(more…)

In December, I blogged about the gas interconnector, the Shannon LNG terminal, and the need for regulatory reform in the wholesale gas market.

Last week, the European Commission chipped in. It is taking Ireland to court over the lack of competition in the market for gas between Scotland and Northern Ireland, and between Ireland north and south. Intriguingly, the UK is sued as well, although most of this is Irish rules on UK soil.

John Fingleton gave a great presentation at last week’s conference on the Irish economy. Among other things, he argued that competition policy in Ireland exists by virtue of the European Union.

(h/t Paul Hunt)

The concept of “fire sale prices” is a useful one in many contexts – some examples are the October 19th 1987 US stock market crash, the LTCM crisis of 1998, and the 2007-8 US credit-liquidity crisis. In all three of these cases, security prices crashed in a particular sub-market, policymakers stepped in providing extraordinary credit-liquidity support, and eventually (quickly in the first two cases, slowly in the last) the capital market situation normalized. Unfortunately, “fire sale prices” is a useless or even harmful analytical tool for understanding the current Irish financial predicament. A better term for current conditions in Irish asset markets is stagnation prices rather than fire sale prices. Policymakers should look to Japan circa 1991 and the following two decades, rather than the USA, for a useful historical precedent. The fire sale concept gives the wrong policy guidance in the Irish situation; it is metaphorically like trying to use a fire hose to drain a swamp.

Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny have a series of papers exploring the use of the fire sale concept in modelling financial markets. There has been a large outpouring of papers by other authors with similar or related models, but the Shleifer and Vishny model is clear and simple and their survey is particularly good. They provide a definition:

“A fire sale is essentially a forced sale of an asset at a dislocated price…. Assets sold in fire sales can trade at prices far below value in best use, causing severe losses to sellers.”

They discuss how fire sales can cause financial and macroeconomic instability via credit and liquidity channels. In a related paper they laud US policymakers for their prompt and correct response in 2007-9 in injecting massive credit and liquidity into the markets for mortgage-related and credit-related securities caught up in the fire sale environment of 2007-9.

Fire sale mitigation policies are unusual as economic policies in that, as a rule, they should result in a net profit for the policymaker. This follows from the theory of the limits to arbitrage. This certainly seems to apply in the US case – the Federal Reserve made a trading profit of $79.3 billion in 2010 and $76.9 billion in 2011. The Fed vastly outperformed the best-performing hedge fund both years, at U.S. civil service pay rates, and without actually trying to make a profit. TARP was also profitable or near profitable, after an adjustment for the expensive but necessary bail-out of the US automobile industry. This is the nature of fire sale mitigation policies – they are about buying securities slightly below fair value and holding them temporarily on government account while injecting liquidity and credit.

The bad news is that this has near-zero relevance for Ireland. Irish asset markets are not suffering from a fire sale problem but rather from a long-horizon stagnation problem. The appropriate comparison case is not from the USA but rather Japan circa 1990. Japanese policymakers and financial institutions worked endlessly to slow the pace of adjustment, leading to an almost twenty year period of stagnation, suppressing growth and business innovation, and leaving a massive overhang of government debt. Irish asset markets need to be forced to adjust quickly and reach their new (much lower) equilibrium values with un-frozen free trading and clear, public pricing. This applies to banks, collateralized pools of debt, commercial leases, and commercial and residential property. Preventing this from happening is not preventing a “fire sale” rather it is guaranteeing a long stagnation. It could even last twenty years, as in Japan.

Another question – what is it about the US environment that gives rise to fire-sale-induced financial crises of typically short duration? Part of the answer lies in the USA lead in financial innovation. New financial innovations were key to all three fire-sale market crashes mentioned in the first paragraph of this post (portfolio insurance, statistical arbitrage, and numerous CDO innovations, respectively). High-frequency trading (the most recent big innovation) will be the likely cause of the next fire-sale-related crash, if one comes in the USA.* Ireland seems to avoid these fire-sale crashes, but is plagued instead by long-lasting periods of stagnation. Let us hope the current one is not dragged out for a decade.

………………………………………………………………………

*A post-script on HFT and the Tobin tax. After my last blogpost, Frank Barry asked me to give more details about Tobin’s use of the term “sand in the wheels” and its application in old-fashioned engineering. I do not know that much about the engineering use of sand in the wheels – I only heard Tobin discussing it in an interview. I now know that historically the sand in the wheels technique was used in the case of a metal (steel or iron) wheel aligned on a track and needing better grip, such as an old-fashioned railway wheel on a wet track. It is used for wheel-type mechanisms and not for gears with teeth. See Wikipedia for some details for those with an interest. I remember Tobin saying he was annoyed that many commentators mistook him as suggesting sabotage, and I remembered that key idea correctly. Sand in the wheels is a technique to improve, not hinder, performance.

I’m sure all the presentations will be posted here at some point but I had promised readers that I would put up my slides on ELA and promissory notes from today’s conference, so here they are.