Author: Kevin O’Rourke

A while ago, I pointed out on this site that a season ticket to Shamrock Rovers offered remarkably good value for money. Any of you who acted on my advice will now be in the happy position of being able to buy tickets for the Juventus game on Thursday.

Just saying.

Agustín Bénétrix, Barry Eichengreen and I have a piece over at Vox looking at the end of house price collapses. Historical patterns don’t suggest that Irish residential prices will stop falling any time soon; the best way to ensure that they do is to let them adjust downwards as speedily as possible.

Update: in light of a recent article in the Sunday Tribune, I should clarify that nowhere in the Vox piece do we present estimates of the extent to which house prices will decline in Ireland. When asked by the journalist in question how far they would have to fall, I replied that I agreed with Morgan Kelly’s analysis, or words to that effect. When pressed as to what that meant, I gave the figure mentioned in the Sunday Tribune. I am always happy to cite and give credit to Morgan’s work in this area, but I am not happy to be presented as an independent source of analysis on the subject, much less to be described as a “leading housing researcher”.

There. That feels better.

David McWilliams mentioned the decline in the Baltic Dry Index in his column last Sunday: there is more on the topic here.

Paul Krugman has a post this morning pointing out that in a standard Mundell-Fleming model, a fiscal contraction in Europe will have a negative effect on its trading partners in a floating rate environment: it not only lowers total European demand, but also leads to a weakening euro. Now, the latter effect is driven by lower European interest rates, and as Krugman acknowledges this channel won’t be working in a textbook manner in a world where European interest rates are almost (if not quite) at the zero bound; but the euro is indeed weakening as we speak, and Americans are getting worried.

There is broader point here. In a Mundell-Fleming world, with floating exchange rates, fiscal expansion is good for one’s trading partners: it involves a positive externality. Whenever you have positive externalities, there is a risk that not enough of whatever produces those externalities will be provided. Thus, in 2009, when fiscal policy was on the agenda, an important role of international coordination was to ensure that nations not try to free ride off each other’s stimulus packages. Cooperation was relatively easy to sustain: the world economy faced a clear and present danger, and nations benefitted from each other’s programmes.

In 2010 things look very different. Fiscal policy has gone into reverse in several countries, and so the focus will presumably shift to monetary and currency policy. But while fiscal stimulus helps a county’s trading partners, currency depreciation hurts them. (More generally, in a Mundell-Fleming floating rate world, expansionary monetary policy in one country hurts other countries — though again the fact that interest rates are almost at zero complicates the analysis.) So, we have moved from a world where macroeconomic policy involved positive spillovers to one where it is likely to involve negative spillovers — a much more ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ world.

Expect lots of protectionist rhetoric in the months ahead.