Year: 2012

Gas interconnection, decision made

I blogged earlier about the draft decision of the CER on the pricing rules for the gas interconnectors.

The decision is now final. I find the document hard to read, because it assumes that you are familiar with the draft decision, and it rambles between the actual decision, decisions that might have been, justification of the decision, and responses to comments to the draft decision. This is what I think was decided:

  1. The interconnector will be moved, legally, from offshore to onshore.
  2. Interconnector capacity will be auctioned.
  3. There is a reserve price for the auction.
  4. The reserve price is the long-run marginal cost.
  5. If the auction does not cover the costs of the pipe-formerly-known-as-the-interconnector, the difference will be split over ALL gas suppliers.

I am not sure whether there will really be an auction, or whether the reserve price will always hold.

The contentious point, however, is the long-run marginal cost. This implies that Bord Gais will have a guaranteed income on its assets.

Instead of forcing BGE to take a hit on what might turn out to be a bad investment in interconnection, the CER forces gas consumers to make up the difference.

This is wrong in principle. It is a transfer from gas users to the owners of BGE. And it distorts competition.

We’re different, roysh? The decoupling of the Dublin property market

Today sees the launch of the fiftieth Daft Report, with a commentary by yours truly. To mark the occasion, and to mark five years of Ireland’s property market crash, Daft.ie and the All-Island Research Observatory at NUI Maynooth, have launched a property value heatmap tool. In a companion post to this one, I outline the tool, how it works and what it tells us about Ireland’s property market crash.

In this post, though, I’d like to highlight what’s in the report itself. The principal finding from Q2 was that conditions in the Dublin market do indeed look to have improved considerably since the start of the year. This has happened at a time when conditions elsewhere in the country are pretty much unchanged. It seems the decoupling of the Dublin property market from the rest of the country has already begun.

Continue reading “We’re different, roysh? The decoupling of the Dublin property market”

Get them while they’re hot (or cold): Heatmaps of property values in Ireland now available

As I note in the companion post to this one, today sees the launch of the fiftieth Daft Report, with a commentary by yours truly. To mark the occasion, and to mark five years of Ireland’s property market crash, Daft.ie and the All-Island Research Observatory at NUI Maynooth, have launched a property value heatmap tool. In this post, I’ll give an outline of what the tool is and does, and what we can learn from it.

Continue reading “Get them while they’re hot (or cold): Heatmaps of property values in Ireland now available”

Wolfgang Münchau states the obvious

Well, it seems obvious to me at any rate: here. If the EFSF/ESM still doesn’t have enough money to deal with Italy and Spain, then we are still in multiple equilibrium territory: if the markets don’t panic, they will be right, and if they do panic, they will also be right.

Don’t get me wrong: this was a good summit that made some important intellectual breakthroughs. But there are only so many things that one summit can do, and we have had so many bad summits that it isn’t clear to me that the system can now deliver the many needed reforms in time.

Let’s not get carried away

While the euro zone leaders’ summit certainly exceeded expectations, the shift from dire pessimism to elation in the Irish press reaction over the last few days seems overdone.    The big question across numerous articles seems to be how much of the €63 billion put into the banks will now be mutualised.   Unfortunately, I don’t see anything in the post-summit statement that leads me to revise a view that the chances of other European countries absorbing already crystallised losses in the Irish banks are approaching zero – the “similar treatment” statement notwithstanding.   More positively, the chances of beneficially refinancing the promissory notes/ELA arrangement looks to have  increased, which (depending on the details) could lead to a large NPV benefit, and thus significantly reduce the burden of banking-related debt.    While this might partly explain the fall in bond yields, my guess is that the majority of the fall reflects a decline in the chances of a major euro zone crisis following financing difficulties in Italy and Spain.    Excessively hyping what has been achieved runs the risk of later disappointment, undermining support for unavoidable adjustment efforts. 

Another worry is that the triumphalism on display following the summit runs the risk complicating German politics on risk sharing.   Thus far, the German government has moved incrementally, slowly bringing a sceptical electorate along with them.   The perception that “Merkel blinked” could lead to a backlash.  

So, yes, Friday morning brought some very welcome news.    But there remains a hard slog ahead.