At last week’s Irish Economic Association conference, Mark Coughlan presented a paper analysing the text of successive Finance Ministers’ budget speeches, as evidence of shifts in policy emphasis, but also in the political economy and management of boom and bust economics. The slides are here and are worth a look.
Author: Stephen Kinsella
Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick.
From NUIG’s Dr Aidan Kane, a (really) long run data set covering Irish fiscal data from 1690 to 1800. This work has been decades in the making and is the first of a series of releases connecting Ireland’s fiscal history to its modern, post establishment of the CSO era. Dr Kane’s new website, Duanaire, has the details.
To get a sense of the level of resolution of the data, take a look at the chart below. Congrats to Dr Kane and let’s hope this resource is used by researchers into the future.
NUIM’s Chris Van Egeraat has posted some recently presented work responding to this Department of Finance working paper (.pdf) on the patent cliff, first brought to my attention, anyway, on this blog by Frank Barry.
Chris looks carefully at the actual products coming off patent and finds only one, Nameda, which is big enough to cause a wobble. As he notes, the amount of information is pretty poor in this area, so caveats remain.
Readers will definitely be interested in this piece by Tom Lyons on what the Ireland’s top bankers (and Indecon’s Alan Gray) knew, chiefly about the state of Anglo Irish Bank, in the run up to the crisis. There is at least one record of the events of the night as set down by Dermot Gleeson.
The (reported) state of knowledge is pretty much the same:
- No one knew how deeply damaged Anglo’s balance sheets were, or could be;
- Much of the focus was on restoring confidence in the system, with everyone talking in terms of liquidity rather than solvency issues, and in terms of preventing a run on the banks.
Despite this invaluable reporting by Tom Lyons one wonders why it took 2029 days to put these accounts into the public sphere. Brian Cowen was right when he argued in his GeorgeTown speech (.pdf) that “if we are to learn from the crisis it is necessary to understand why many of the actions taken seemed sensible at the time”.
Cowen goes on to write:
We had to deal with this crisis in real time. Our view at the time was that we would get one shot at calming the markets.
Tom Lyons’ piece seems to back up this account.
This piece by the FT’s Vincent Boland, featuring TCD’s Constantin Gurdgiev, The Irish Examiner’s Mick Clifford, and (ahem) myself has more reaction to the fallout from the Anglotrial.
This year’s IEA will take place on May 8th and 9th in the CastleTroy Park Hotel, Limerick. The ESR Lecture will be given by Prof. Rachel Griffith, while Prof. Jordi Gali will give the Edgeworth Lecture. The conference is full of strong papers from a diverse set of scholars.
Registration for the conference is through the exordo site. Early registration costs 95 euros and includes dinner on the 8th. There is a much lower price for student delegates at 25 euros.
Bookings for accommodation should be made directly through the CastleTroy Park Hotel, quoting “IEA2014” for a discounted room price.
I’m looking forward to seeing you there in a few weeks.