Title: Expulsions: The Fifth Circle of Hell
Speaker: Professor Saskia Sassen (Columbia University and LSE)
Date and time: 15 January 2013, 7 pm
Venue: Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building
Details here.
Month: January 2013
There are many journalists in Dublin this week for the start of the EU Presidency.
The Charlemagne column in the new issue of the Economist is here.
here.
New IMF work here.
Summary: We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades. Specifically, our dataset consists of fiscal revenues, primary expenditures, the interest bill (and thus both the primary and the overall fiscal deficit), the government debt, and gross domestic product, for 55 countries for up to two hundred years. For the first time, a large cross country historical data set covers both fiscal stocks and flows. Using Bohn’s (1998) approach and other tests for fiscal sustainability, we document how the degree of prudence or profligacy varies significantly over time within individual countries. We find that such variation is driven in part by unexpected changes in potential economic growth and sovereign borrowing costs.
The sale of €1 billion of the Convertible Contingent Capital notes that the Exchequer purchased as part of the 2011 PCAR recapitalisation has gone through today. The announcement from the Department of Finance is here, while a Bank of Ireland report providing some details of the sale is here.
The notes had an annual yield of 10%. There are €2 billion remaining in AIB/EBS and PTSB. Is the sale of the BOI portion a good deal?
The NTMA have published their Results and Business Review for 2012. The value of the ordinary and preference shares held by the NPRF in AIB and BOI is estimated to be €8.6 billion, up from €8.1 billion at the end of the third quarter. The value of the “discretionary fund” is €6.1 billion.
At the end of the year the balance in the Exchequer and Other Accounts was €20 billion. The Exchequer Borrowing Requirement for 2013 is projected to be €15.4 billion (or €18.5 billion if two Promissory Note payments are made).
This week’s activities will have pushed these balances to around €23.5 billion. The NTMA plan on raising another €7.5 billion of funds with medium- and long-term bonds during the year and the final €11.5 billion of EU/IMF programme loans are also scheduled to be drawn down. With a €5 billion bond payment due in April this would result in cash balances of €22 billion (or €19 billion) at the end of the year.
UPDATE: Further statement from the Department of Finance on BOI bond sale here.