Year: 2012

I am now planning to talk at Friday’s conference about promissory notes, ELA and all that. I will post a link to a detailed presentation when it’s finished, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this now.

However, I do want make a brief comment on the recent media commentary on the promissory note issue. Most of this commentary has motivated the issue in the same terms as this article in today’s Irish Times by Arthur Beesley:

State support for the bank is being financed with expensive promissory notes which carry a comparatively high interest rate of some 8.6 per cent.

This is considerably in excess of the prevailing rates for stability facility loans, leading the Government to explore whether it is feasible to draw down additional stability fund aid to replace the promissory note scheme.

Arthur is a fine journalist but I’m afraid this is not a good way to think about this issue. The interest on the promissory notes is going from one part of the state (central exchequer funds) to another (the IBRC). Since the interest rate on these notes is higher than the average interest rate on IBRC’s liabilities, the additional margin can be retained inside IBRC and handed back to the state at a later date. 

So the key issue in relation to the burden on the taxpayer of the IBRC is the amount of liabilities that need to be paid out to bondholders and central banks, and the timing of these repayments, not the interest rate on the promissory note.

I’d note that Arthur’s colleague, John McManus, correctly explains this aspect of the promissory note issue in this article (though other parts of the article are not correct, such as the claim that the Central Bank of Ireland had to borrow the ELA funds from the ECB and that the ELA needs to be collateralised by marketable assets.) The true interest cost of the promissory notes is the interest on the €3.1 billion a year being borrowed from the EU and IMF to hand over to the IBRC, not the notional interest rate on the promissory notes.