The Greens Against Nama group have released a number of videos featuring interviews with various people who disagree with the Nama proposals. Link here. It looks like they may have more to upload but thus far there are a number of interesting interviews with people such as Ronan Lyons, Shane Ross and Peter Mathews, a former banker with ICC and currently an independent banking and property consultant.
Author: Karl Whelan
At Trinity College last night, Joe Stiglitz repeated his criticism of NAMA. The Irish Times reports:
He said Nama is likely to “burden this generation for 25-50 years or more. I am very uncomfortable with a government with such a minority support making such a decision.”
He said the view there is no alternative is “just wrong”.
“There is an alternative. Play by the rules of capitalism – if you can’t pay back your debt, shareholders and bondholders lose. If the Government puts in money, it needs to get control commensurate with the money put in. It also should get a return proportionate to the risk involved – in this case, it’s a big risk.”
The Minister for Finance has responded to Stiglitz’s criticisms. According to Bloomberg:
Lenihan pointed to the U.S. as an example of a rescue package that was attacked before succeeding.
“I simply do not accept his analysis,” Lenihan said. “As far as Professor Stiglitz is concerned, he made the same criticism of the U.S. bank package, which is now proved to be a tremendous success.”
Of course, the US TARP bank package, which Minister Lenihan is referring to as a tremendous success, started life like NAMA as a plan to overpay for troubled assets but was changed to become a plan in which the US government made equity investments in the leading financial institutions.
Stiglitz has argued that the terms of the TARP equity investments were insufficiently generous to the US taxpayer—see here for a report from TARP’s Congressional Oversight Panel which endorses this viewpoint. It would be misleading, however, to characterise the Stiglitz’s criticisms of TARP as being directly related to his views on NAMA. On this issue, see here for an interview with Joe from Feburary in which, among other things, he discusses proposals then being floated for the US government to purchase bad assets—he characterises Paulson’s orginal TARP plan as “cash for trash”.
I have noted before that even if one sets aside issues relating to fairness and cost to the Irish taxpayer, I don’t believe that NAMA will achieve what the government states is its purpose, namely “getting credit flowing again.”
In this context, it is interesting to see that there is a debate this week in the US, prompted by this government report, which focuses on, among other things, whether TARP increased lending at assisted institutions. Chicago’s Casey Mulligan writes about it here.
The report’s conclusions, on page 30, noted that there were US government officials who had concerns about the health of some of the banks being assisted and that statements that TARP was going to get lending going again created “unrealistic expectations.”
James Kwak of Baseline Scenario responds here that the politicians knew full well that TARP probably wouldn’t increase lending—that it was more an emergency measure to keep the banking system afloat—and that these claims were made simply to obtain the necessary political support for an unpopular measure. Sound familiar?
With the Lisbon debate now over bar the voting and counting, I’m hoping that despite widespread exhaustion with the topic of NAMA, we can now have a debate about this issue that doesn’t involve misleading spin about IOUs, free money from the ECB, support from international organisations and the like. It’s with that in mind that I have written this article for today’s Irish Times.
Reading it now, the tone seems a bit more strident than my usual approach but I think it’s important that misleading spin be seen for what it is so that we can return the focus to the basic questions of correctly diagnosing the problems with our banking sector and designing fair and efficient ways to deal with them.
For that reason, I don’t plan to engage in a comment-fest here on the various distractions that have been been central elements of the government’s PR campaign on NAMA. If you don’t agree with me about free money, IOUs, ECB, international organisations, or frogs and locusts, fine, but I’ve said my piece on these and don’t see much benefit from repeating myself any more.
I don’t have time to report any detailed analysis of today’s Live Register figures but it is worth noting that September was the first month since December 2007 in which the unemployment rate did not rise. The standardised unemployment rate remained at 12.6%. As an aside, I’d note that this is still two tenths higher than the rate previously reported for August because higher second quarter unemployment in the QNHS, upon which this measure is based, saw the previous figures revised upwards.
Combined with last week’s GDP release, which showed flat seasonally adjusted GDP in the second quarter—consistent with a 6.7 percent year over year decline if GDP stayed flat for the second half of the year—there are now good reasons to believe that the economy is bottoming out. Of course, there must be concerns that further fiscal contraction could undo this stabilisation but hopefully by the time this kicks in there will be a decent world recovery to help out.