Irish Financial Regulation: Guidelines Rather Than Rules

In his testimony this morning, Patrick Neary explained that the mandated bank lending sectoral concentration limits, which were seriously breached by the Irish banks during the credit bubble, could not actually be enforced since they were guidelines rather than rules. This distinction between guidelines and rules has eerie similarities to a classic scene in The Pirates of the Caribbean, where pirate captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) explains to Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) the flexibility of The Pirates Code.

A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy?

NYT profile here.

Resolution of the Irish banking crisis: Hard-earned lessons for Europe’

Speech by Lars Frisell here.

QUB public policy blog

Queen’s University Belfast have just launched a new blog at http://qpol.qub.ac.uk/ (via Muiris MacCarthaigh).

QPol is the ‘front door’ for public policy engagement at Queen’s University Belfast, supporting academics and policymakers in sharing evidence-based research and ideas on the major social, cultural and economic challenges facing us regionally, nationally and beyond.

Our over-arching vision is to share the University’s independent expertise with policymakers so they can make informed decisions about the most effective and sustainable ways to tackle these challenges, now and in the future.

Our mission is to:

Facilitate the provision of independent evidence-based advice, guidance and information to policymakers, ensuring that policy formulation and law-making are informed by world-class research emerging from the University
Ensure Queen’s as it the heart of the public policy discourse, shaping and driving the debate on emerging challenges, helping policymakers to think ‘longer term’ and more strategically about the challenges facing us today
Cultivate and encourage engagement between the academic and the policymaker through effective methods of communication and mutually understandable language
Accelerate the socio-economic impact of research relating to public policy issues at Queen’s and raise awareness of the influence of the University’s research on government policy and legislation
We want to inspire intelligent debate between democratic institutions, academia and wider society in a vast array of policy areas including the economy, public health, social justice and more.

Submission from Department of Finance to the Low Pay Commission on the National Minimum Wage

here.