A bit self-referential perhaps but readers might be interested in this Irish Times article on academic blogging.
Year: 2012
This is very much the business end of the mortgage arrears and/or debt forgiveness debate (which Seamus looked at in an earlier post).
It seems that a number of groups have gotten together to stop the enforcement of eviction orders, and in at least one case, two days ago, they were at least temporarily successful. NamaWineLake has the details. Be sure to watch the video as well.
What’s fascinating from watching the video is how reasonable everyone is, given the obvious tensions in the air. There is a discussion, and a withdrawal from the property of the authorities who came to serve a notice to quit. The circumstances of the borrower in question are also highlighted in a linked piece.
The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has announced the Government’s plans for the sale of state assets. Interestingly, rather than sell a minority stake in the ESB the plan now is to sell non-strategic power generation capacity – in my view a more sensible approach.
In December, I blogged about the peculiar pricing rules for the gas interconnector with Scotland. (The current rules would grant substantial market power to importers of LNG.
The CER has been aware of this for a while, and has now published a draft decision. The proposal boils down to the following elements:
- The interconnector will be moved, legally, from offshore to onshore. It remains to be seen that this would satisfy the European Commission, which is not happy either about the current regime.
- Interconnector capacity will be auctioned.
- There is a reserve price for the auction.
- The reserve price is the long-run marginal cost.
- If the auction do not cover the costs of the pipe-formerly-known-as-the-interconnector, the difference will be split over ALL gas suppliers.
Shannon LNG is understandably cross. They publicly fume about point 5, which will impose a cost on them that rises as they are more successful, but privately they must have hoped that the rules would not change. While I have argued that the rules should change, the current proposal can easily be spun as the regulator protecting a state-owned company from a private competitor.
Point 4 is worrying too. In the decision document, the CER goes back and forth between OPEX for the reserve price and OPEX+CAPEX. In the end, they opt for OPEX+CAPEX. Essentially, they propose to perpetually reward Bord Gais for what increasingly looks like a bad investment decision in the past.
Nothing has been set in stone yet. Let us hope that the CER will reconsider.
Back in 2010, as the world turned austerian, people like Adam Posen started to worry about the political consequences. Indeed, so did I. Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen and I have a new working paper which looks at the political consequences of economic hard times in the 1920s and 1930s, which you can read here.