Is here. It makes for fascinating reading, in particular in respect of government debt (.pdf).
Author: Stephen Kinsella
Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick.
Required reading for sites like this. See here.
INFINITI is on the move from Dublin. In 2013, the 11th INFINITI Conference on International Finance will be held in Aix-en-Provence, France, organised by SciencesPo Aix, Trinity College Dublin and Euromed Management Marseille, in coordination with the Aix-Marseille School of Economics.
Keynote speakers this year will be René M Stulz, Everett D Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics at the Ohio State University, and Geert Bekaert, Leon G Cooperman Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University.
Please see www.infiniticonference.com for more information.
Colm McCarthy sums up the case for a third benchmarking exercise in his Sindo column. Read the whole thing, but this quote more or less sums it up:
The case for dismantling them is simple. The employer is bust, the good times are over and the financial stability of the State is on the line.
There are pros and cons to Colm’s argument, and second order effects to any change in public sector pay, just to pick two: given that the ESRI estimated in 2010 that for every €1 billion in public sector cuts, consumer spending falls by approximately €750 million. Our household debt levels are some of the highest in the world, so large drops in public sector pay might well lead to a spate of defaults. But a benchmarking exercise seems like a very sensible way to proceed in my opinion.
Vincent O’Sullivan and I spend some time thinking about the proposed new supervisory authority for the EU run from the ECB in this Vox article, and get worried about the uncertainty the proposal generates. It complements our Harvard Business Review piece earlier in the week.
The question for our blog’s readers is: would a pan European regulator have stopped (or substantially reduced) Ireland’s buildup of private debt during the boom? Obviously gaining an Eurozone-wide perspective is a good thing but detail may be lost in the process.