Author: Karl Whelan

Publicly-Owned Banks and the ECB

Commenter MM highlighted this article from Saturday’s Irish Times by John Kelly and Eunan King as an interesting argument in favour of the government’s current approach towards the banks and against nationalising banks. The Kelly-King duo wrote that an

advantage of the proposed Nama model is that keeping most of the banks as stock market entities enables the ECB to fund part of the Irish Government’s deficit, in a manner that provides the veneer that the central bank is not buying government bonds directly.

This is a practice prohibited under the rules governing the establishment of the ECB, because it amounts to the central bank simply printing money to finance Government spending.

I do not believe that this argument is correct. The clause in the European Treaty prohibiting monetary financing is Article 101 of the Consolidated Treaty of European Union (link here). This has two paragraphs and they read as follows:

1. Overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility with the ECB or with the central banks of the Member States (hereinafter referred to as ‘national central banks’) in favour of Community institutions or bodies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the ECB or national central banks of debt instruments.

2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to publicly owned credit institutions which, in the context of the supply of reserves by central banks, shall be given the same treatment by national central banks and the ECB as private credit institutions.

So while Paragraph 1 rules out the ECB giving loan facilities to, or purchasing bonds from, national governments, Paragraph 2 explicitly states that this does not apply to publicly owned credit institutions. As such, lending to nationalised banks does not break the prohibition on monetary financing.

Furthermore, even under the NAMA plan no central bank is “buying govenment bonds directly”. Rather, what is being proposed—whether we have a stand-alone NAMA or a NAMA used in conjunction with nationalisation of some banks—is using these bonds as collateral for loans from the ECB.

Jurgen Stark on ECB Operations

Here‘s an interesting speech from ECB Executive Board member Jurgen Stark about the plan for an exit strategy from the current non-standard operational framework.  Two quotes stand out for me:

As regards our area of responsibility, we are well prepared to phase out the measures we took in response to the crisis. The way these measures were implemented provides us with reasonable flexibility in unwinding them. For example, unless we decide otherwise, the maturity and size of our operations will automatically decrease, starting next year.

And, more interestingly,

It is therefore crucial to monitor the sources of funding constraints for banks. We need to judge whether these funding constraints relate to individual banks rather than to the functioning of the money market and the banking system as a whole. Our operational framework is not designed to counter funding problems at the individual bank level. Rather, our funding support is designed to alleviate funding risk to the extent that it is systemic.

Guest Post: Donal O’Mahony on NAMA

After a somewhat unsatisfactory appearance together on Prime Time last week, in which we got to share fourteen minutes of airtime with a trade union leader and a property developer, I asked Donal O’Mahony (Global Strategist with Davy’s) if he was interested in writing a guest post on NAMA for this blog. Donal agreed and his post is below the fold.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Donal O’Mahony on NAMA”

ESR Paper on Public Sector Pay

The new edition of the Economic and Social Review is now available online. The edition contains two policy papers. One is this paper by Eilish Kelly, Seamus McGuinness and Philip O’Connell on public sector pay rates. I think Richard Tol is going to open a thread on the other paper which focuses on the carbon tax.

The three regular papers in the edition (David Audretsh on entrepreneurship, Ken Benoit and Michael Marsh on political science in Ireland, and Vahagn Galstyan and Philip Lane on fiscal policy and competitiveness) are also, in my opinion, very interesting contributions.

Ronan Lyons on Long-Term Economic Value

Ireland’s leading property number cruncher, Ronan Lyons, has a post essentially explaining how he would have done the LTEV calculations if he had been asked. Key conclusion:

the adjustment from current market value  should be downwards by 10% to about €44bn, and not upwards to €54bn.