Author: Philip Lane

TASC on the Finance Act

TASC have produced a report on the Finance Act: you can download it here.  It covers a mix of: (i) economic efficiency issues – is the tax system efficient?; (ii) process issues – can the process by which the Finance Act is formed and legislated be improved?; and (iii) value issues – the design of the tax system has a fundamental influence on the distribution of income and wealth, with TASC advocating a shift towards a tax system that supports greater equality of outcomes.

Martin Wolf on the Greek Rescue Package

Martin Wolf offers his perspective in this FT article.

Global Finance Academy Conference

The 4th Global Finance Academy (GFA) conference will taked place at the University College Dublin (UCD) Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business on May 26th.

REGISTRATION
The 2010 conference will be held over 1 day on Wednesday 26th May 2010 at the Graduate School of Business campus in Blackrock.

The speakers include Michael Brennan (UCLA), Cal Muckley (UCD), Bart Lambrecht (Lancaster),
Christopher Polk (LSE), Matt Spiegel (Yale) and Hassan Tehranian (Boston).
The conference is free, but delegates must register by emailing the organizer, Cal Muckley (cal.muckley@ucd.ie), as soon as possible or by Friday, May 7th at the latest.

AIB “too smart to buy this junk”

The AIB Chairman apologised today at the bank’s AGM for the self-inflicted problems caused by excessive lending to the property and construction sectors. At least, AIB avoided major losses in the US toxic securities sector  – as revealed in the Congressional hearings on Goldman Sachs, the GS view was that AIB was “too smart to buy this junk”.

See this report on the hearings and this extract featruing the committee chair Senator Carl Levin:

Levin chides Sparks for selling “junk”: In his second jousting session with Sparks, Sen. Levin questioned the former executive about the bank’s Hudson Mezzanine deal, reading an email from a Goldman salesperson in which she said that the client, Allied Irish Bank, was “too smart to buy this junk.”

“I didn’t believe it was junk. We didn’t believe it was a junk. A sales person said that,” Sparks said.

“Yes, if a sales person believed it was junk, you were selling junk,” Levin replied.

Powerpoint and Analysis

This blog has periodically featured posts on the role of visual devices to improve analytical understanding  –  this NYT article reports on how the US military has become a slave to Powerpoint (and features an interesting slide).