Author: Karl Whelan

NAMA and Zoe-Related Developments

One of the key questions relating to how NAMA is going to operate is the price that will be paid for the assets it acquires.  Last week’s Sunday Tribune reported that

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) plans to impose discounts of between 25% and 33% on the most devalued loans contained among the €80bn of property assets to be transfered to the state-owned organisation.

The Tribune story speculated that discounts of this size would help NAMA to break even or perhaps make money over its ten-year life cycle. Of course, one of the problems that we have had when thinking about this issue is that these discussions are happening in the abstract without reference to detailed knowledge about specific loans.

For this reason, the ACC-triggered High Court examinership of Liam Carroll’s Zoe Group is very helpful in giving us a specific example to discuss.  In Monday’s Irish Times, John McManus reported the following:

Applying for court protection Zoe said that if the group of six companies, which have total debts of €1.2 billion, was liquidated, they would have a deficit of €900 million. Based on this writedown value, properties on which it has borrowed €1.1 billion from eight banks would fetch €275 million if they went on sale this morning.

That means a 75 per cent writedown for the banks.

Ok then, let’s have a write-in competition. What do readers think is the correct price at which the Irish taxpayer should purchase these Liam Carroll property investments?  The €275 million they are worth today, the €550 million they’d be worth if they doubled in price or the €737 million (one third discount relative to €1.1 billion) that the Tribune reckons would be the lowest possible price that NAMA would pay?

In interpreting the various answers put forward, it might be helpful to keep in mind that AIB has over €24 billion in pure development loans and has core equity capital of about €8 billion.

This Week’s Minimum Wage Debate

I’m just back from spending a few days at the McGill Summer School in Donegal.  Joe Mulholland is to be commended for having put together a very interesting line-up of speakers and I very much enjoyed my couple of days there.

One strange aspect of the McGill event, however, has been the media coverage.  Judging from newspaper front pages, one would conclude that the sessions involved heated discussions about proposals to cut the minimum wage.  In fact, this was not the case.

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Central Banks Forecasts Not So Grim

The lead headline in the Irish Times today must have depressed many: “Economy to shrink 11% over the next 18 months, says Central Bank.”  Things feel bad now, how bad would they feel if output fell by another 11% over the next 18 months.  Well, this is not at all what was forecasted by the Central Bank and their forecast is actually not that gloomy at all.

First, the bank’s forecast is that the average level of GDP in 2009 will be 8.3% lower than the average level of GDP in 2008, and then that the average level of GDP in 2010 will be 3% lower than in 2009.  The Bank did not release a forecast about what will happen over the next 18 months.

Second, while the Bank (like the ESRI) do not release quarterly assumptions underlying their forecast, one can back out roughly what they might look like.  Seasonally adjusted real GDP in 2009:Q1 is already 5.8% below last year’s average level.  So, if GDP was flat for the remaining three quarters of the year, then the Bank’s figure for the year average over year average for 2009 would be -5.8%.  One way to get their figure of -8.3% is to assume a decline of  -1.8% over each of the last three quarters of the year.

However, if that were to occur, then even a flat level of GDP in 2010 would produce a year average over year average figure for 2010 of -2.7%.  So, in fact, rather than an 11% decline over the next 18 months, the banks figures are actually consistent with a decline in GDP from the end of June to December this year of 3.6%, followed by a very small decline in the first quarter of 2010 and flat GDP after. A more likely scenario that would produce the Central Bank’s forecasted outcome would see a larger fall in 2010:Q1 and perhaps 2010:Q2 followed by a recovery in the subsequent quarters.  In light of the severe fiscal contraction being inflicted on the economy over this period, this would not represent such a bad outcome.

Beyond the question of what the Central Bank forecast actually implies, there is the more general issue, which I have referred to before, of the difficulty in mapping forecasts based on year-average over year-average into commentary about what is actually happening now in the economy.

Rossa White of Davy’s has also written on this issue.  See here.

Dorgan on the Smart Economy

Former IDA chief executive Seán Dorgan has an interesting article on the Smart Economy in today’s Irish Times, partly rebutting some of the points made in Declan Jordan’s recent piece.  One of the arguments made by Dorgan that I found interesting was the following:

The Technology Foresight reviews were undertaken a decade ago with the realisation that a production model based on low costs and labour surpluses had run its course.

Instead, Ireland had to move to higher value activities and create a new dynamic for growth. The competitive power of knowledge and innovation was identified, for indigenous development and winning international investments.

One of the points I made when last discussing this issue was that the Smart Economy strategy seemed more appropriate for the later days of the Celtic Tiger, when the economy was at full employment after years of attracting FDI.  Dorgan’s article further enforces that impression: With unemployment already at almost 12% and going higher, should we really be talking about moving beyond industrial policy strategies based on the availability of labour surpluses?

Public Sector Pay Differentials: Regressions Can Actually Be Useful

Last week, the CSO released the latest results from the National Employment Survey, which reports detailed information on earnings across all sectors of the economy.  The data from the survey relate to October 2007.

The first media treatment of the story that I saw was the Sunday Independent’s lead story saying the public sector is “now earning 50 per cent more the private sector.”  My reaction was that while the headline might be true, this wasn’t a very useful way to think about the issue of public sector pay. 

The report also details a host of other well-known patterns: Those with more education earn more, older workers earn more, those in professional occupations earn more.  With the possible exception of Vincent Browne, I’m not sure there is anyone out there who would draw the implication from these figures that the government should intervene to eliminate all these gaps.

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