As cited by Martin Wolf in today’s FT, Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England has a very clear exposition of the problems with stress tests: you can read his speech here.
Author: Philip Lane
It is certainly quite difficult to measure properly the liabilities of the Irish banking sector, if this term is defined to mean those banks that are embedded in the Irish economy with significant domestic non-bank business. The main problem is that the aggregate banking data (as published by the BIS and the Irish central bank) are dominated by the activities of international bank groups that run significant volumes through the IFSC. These operations are pure offshore financial intermediaries and should be ignored in terms of assessing the scale of liabilities of the domestic banking system.
Rossa White has a written a useful short note “Irish banking liabilities – True figure is just over 300% of GDP, one-third of bogus ratio being quoted,” which is available via the Davy website.
Brendan Keenan has an excellent analysis of the fiscal challenge facing the government: you can read it here.
The IMF has released a ‘staff note’ on how do foreclosure mitigation: you can read it here. While the focus is the US, it is a general primer that is also relevant to Ireland.
You can read the assessment of Ireland’s Stability and Convergence Programme here. It is also useful to look at the assessments of the other EU countries, in order put the Irish position into a comparative context.