All of the presentations and audio from the Irish Economy conference are archived here.
Month: February 2013
An inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the 2008 banking guarantee is to be held. Judging by the previous inquiries we’ve had, I wouldn’t expect too much in the way of actual action, though previous inquiries (Moriarty, Morris, Mahon, Planning as examples) have produced lots of paper and lawyers’ fees as by products.
What should the scope of this inquiry be? And what would commenters like asked of the people likely to be involved in such an inquiry?
You might have thought that the disastrous but wholly unsurprising eurozone GDP numbers indicate that the bloc is in a bad way, and will continue to be so until the current macroeconomic policy mix is jettisoned.
Happily, Olli “Don’t mention the multiplier” Rehn has good news for us:
The current situation can be summarised like this: we have disappointing hard data from the end of last year, some more encouraging soft data in the recent past and growing investor confidence in the future.
Thank goodness for that.
The Commission have released their updated economic forecasts for 2013 and 2014. With an estimated –0.6% contraction in 2012 the eurozone is forecast to contract by a further –0.3% in 2013.
Ireland is set to be the third fastest growing eurozone country with the 1.1% growth forecast behind only Estonia (3.0%) and Malta (1.5%). This is not a reflection of any strong performance in Ireland’s case. Inflation for the eurozone at 1.8% is “close to but below 2%” though.
The public balance for the eurozone is forecast to fall from -3.5% of GDP last year to –2.8% of GDP this year. No eurozone country is expected to run a surplus and at –7.3% of GDP Ireland will have the largest public deficit in the eurozone (the UK at –7.4% of GDP is expected to have the largest deficit in the EU27).
All of the details are available from this page (though for the moment some of the numbers in the interactive map do not match those in the statistical annex).
The SMP data have been released – here. ECB holds euro 14.2 billion of Irish bonds (at face value).