Author: Karl Whelan

Dan O’Brien on the Story of the Bailout

Dan O’Brien has an interesting article (and an accompanying news piece) in today’s Irish Times on the “behind-the-scenes” story of Ireland’s bailout. The article is based on interviews for a radio documentary to be aired tomorrow on BBC Radio 4.

I suspect that regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised at the story of how the ECB triggered Ireland’s bailout and then favoured a plan involving a larger upfront fiscal adjustment than the government were comfortable with and a massive and rapid downsizing of the banking sector.

Time will tell whether the ECB’s actions in November helped or hindered the resolution of Ireland’s economic problems.  However, the story of November’s events does raise very serious questions about the role the ECB now plays in European politics. Should the key role in this historic decision have been played by an unelected and essentially unaccountable organisation?

Banks Downgraded to Junk

This seems like bad news and hardly the kind of response the government would have been hoping for after its stress test report and recapitalisation commitments. What I don’t know is whether this makes much difference at this point in relation to corporate deposits. Is it the case that the large deposits that were going to be pulled are already gone or is this downgrade going to trigger further withdrawals?

Buchheit and Gulati on Greek Debt

Today’s article by Wolfgang Munchau is a summary of the dinner talk that he gave at last week’s EUI workshop on sovereign default. A very interesting counterpart to Munchau’s article is this paper by veteran sovereign debt lawyer Lee Buchheit (lead negotiator for Iceland! with its creditors) and Mitu Gulati (Duke law professor) which discusses other scenarios for Greek debt. Buchheit and Gulati gave very interesting presentations on this and other relevant topics at the EUI conference (a podcast is due to go up this week and I will pass on the link when it does). It perhaps goes without saying that this paper has a lot of relevance for Ireland.

A Fiscally-Neutral Stimulus Package

Minister Brendan Howlin on RTE’s The Week in Politics has said the government are preparing a “stimulus package that is fiscally neutral”.  As a macroeconomist, this strikes me as a pretty strange concept. Pretty much everywhere else in the world, a stimulus package implies a set of measures that cut taxes or raise spending and are not “fiscally neutral.”

Still, one can hardly argue that the current set of tax and spending policies are optimised to generate as much employment as possible, so it may be possible to adjust policies to generate additional employment and I’d be interested in people’s suggestions for fiscally neutral measures that can boost employment. But shouldn’t we stop calling such changes “stimulus packages”?

Workshop: Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default?

I’m going to Florence this afternoon to present at a workshop on “Life in the Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default?” that will be taking place tomorrow at the European University Institute. The program looks interesting and there will be a live web stream of the event. The slides for my presentation are here in Powerpoint 2007 format and here in a somewhat grimier PDF.