The Irish Economy

The lead story in today’s Irish Times carries the headline “Overseas deposits at Irish banks increase significantly”. Well, here’s a chart showing non-resident deposits for the three definitions of the Irish banking sector published by the Central Bank: All Banks, Domestic Group (which excludes IFSC banks) and Covered Banks.

How many of you can see the series increasing significantly at the last data point, in the usual sense of the word, meaning a large increase? It appears the headline reflects the following wording provided by Dan O’Brien (who would not have written the headline): “The small but significant increase in deposits …” In other words, Dan is saying that overseas deposits didn’t rise significantly but the small uptick could potentially be a good sign for the future.

Beyond the headline (sub-editor screwups seem to be very common at newspapers) what’s odd about the story is that even though the latest data on overseas and resident deposits don’t show much more than a continuation of recent trends, the rest of the piece treats the release as though something interesting has happened, including the obligatory crowing from Minister Noonan:

The Central Bank statistics on deposits point to a stabilisation of the Irish financial system. Responding to the developments, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said the “deposit figures illustrate growing national and international confidence in the Irish banking system. It is particularly impressive that the deposit position of the Irish banks has improved at a time of such global uncertainty.”

He described the cash inflows as an “an endorsement of the Government’s restructuring of the banking system. This restructuring has reduced the cost of the banks to the State and has also seen the banks beginning to access international money markets without the benefit of the State guarantee.”

For those interested in actually seeing what’s going on with deposits (yes I know the chart above is rubbish — I don’t know how other people get decent quality graphs up on this site!) here’s a Powerpoint presentation (also here in grimer PDF) with charts for total deposits, non-resident deposits, resident deposits, and private sector resident deposits. In addition to the Total/Domestic/Covered breakdown, I’ve provided charts for an IFSC/Domestic Non-Covered/Covered breakdown.

I surmise from these charts that the non-resident withdrawals have largely tailed off and that the trend for resident deposits in the covered banks remains a downward one.

Today is the third birthday of Ireland’s blanket guarantee of 6 banks’ assets and liabilities, and 64 billion euros later, let’s take the opportunity to reflect on all that has gone on in Irish public and economic life, to assess how much real change there has been within the institutions that helped bring about the crisis, and perhaps to look a little towards the future. So fire away in the comments.

One small(ish) point though, from something I’m working on with my UL colleague Vincent O’Sullivan. It is true that the late Mr Lenihan did guarantee the banks three years ago. It is not true that that is when State support for these banks began, and we shouldn’t mix the two up. Banks like Anglo were in trouble before that, and to a significant extent. These are not (well not yet anyway) historical curiosa, because we still need to understand and deal with the issues our Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) raises.

To take Anglo, for example: The first mention of ELA which was the supported provided in March 2008 was in the interim accounts for 2009 of Anglo Irish Bank.  From note 20, page 46:

“These deposits include €13.5 billion (30 September 2008: €7.6 billion; 31 March 2008: €3.6 billion) borrowed under open market operations from central banks and €10.0 billion (30 September 2008: €0; 31 March 2008: €0) borrowed under a Master Loan Repurchase Agreement (‘MLRA’) with the Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland. The interest rate on this facility is set by the Central Bank and advised at each rollover, and is currently linked to the European Central Bank marginal lending facility rate.”

In the 2009 annual report the amount lent by the CBI has increased to €11.5 billion. Collateral pledged has fallen to €12.49 billion, implying a much lower haircut of €990 million on €12,490 million, or 7.9%. See (d) on page 91 and Note 37 on page 104.

The 2010 interim report shows the collateral posted by Anglo Irish bank becomes mostly promissory notes issued to that bank by the Irish government and that the ‘MLRA’ agreement has, for the most part been superseded by a ‘special masterloan repurchase agreement (SMRA)’.

For more background information on what happened, Simon Carswell’s book Anglo Republic is excellent and highly recommended, though it doesn’t go into the ELA detail.

Dan argues the ECB case for not burning Anglo bondholders in today’s Irish Times. I’ll quote the main argument at length

Apart from Ireland, nobody else in the euro zone has sought to make seniors take their losses so there are no cases to which one can point as evidence. But an immediate neighbour’s experience has been watched very closely. Denmark last year introduced the toughest bank resolution laws in Europe. These laws, which govern the winding-down of bust banks, are more similar to those in the United States than those across the rest of Europe. In the US, senior bank bondholders have traditionally got their just desserts if the institutions they invest in fail.

When two Danish banks failed earlier this year, their seniors were burned. This raised funding costs for the entire Danish banking system.

From the euro zone perspective, the ECB is obliged to consider that if a default precedent were to be set in the senior bond market, then at the very least funding costs for all banks in the zone would rise. The savings for Ireland of a few billion euro would be offset many times over by the generalised increase in funding costs for the already-teetering euro zone banking system.

That there is good reason – in the collective European interest – not to burn seniors does not lessen the injustice of having Irish citizens pay for European bankers’ losses (although the hugely subsidised bailout loan is a partial de facto spreading of the burden).

The point that burning senior bondholders may raise the cost of funding for banks is a fair one. But the relatively lower cost of bank funding obtained from a policy of supporting all senior bondholders is hardly a free lunch. The additional risk that the market would perceive as being attached to bank bondholders would have been transferred away from sovereigns.

Now one could argue that some sovereigns in the Euro area are in a position to take on this kind of risk in order to protect their banking systems. But others clearly are not.

My position on this is that there is no need for the question of burning senior bondholders to be a simple black or white proposition. As I discussed in this paper, the EU could adopt a policy that sees senior bondholders only incur haircuts if equity and subordinated bonds have been wiped out, the bank has been nationalised, and the state has incurred costs of x% of GDP to bring the bank back to solvency.

What x is could be a matter for policy discussions, and could evolve over time. But a policy that set x=5% would mean that the EU is only ruling out bailouts that would place enormous burdens on the state. Indeed, given the state of Euro area public finances, there simply isn’t room for another round of expensive bank bailouts so an approach of this sort may help to reduce the perceived riskiness of much of Europe’s sovereign debt.

This policy could see the remaining Anglo senior bondholders receive severe haircuts without implying a contagion effect for other institutions apart from those the market suspect to be severely insolvent and to which states should probably be reluctant to offer blanket liability guarantees.

But, of course, such a policy would tradeoff state and private sector interests in a balanced way and, as I argue in this paper, M. Trichet’s approach to the question of debt defaults has consistently been characterised by dogma rather than balance.

Feasta (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) are holding an interesting conference on Thursday and Friday of this week titled National Strategies for Dealing with Ireland’s Debt Crisis: Exploring the Options. The webpage for the conference is here and the conference programme is here.

TASC’s Progressive Economy blog has an interesting post by Tom McDonnell, Michael Burke and Michael Taft on restructuring promissory notes. I think it is important that there be more public discussion of this issue. With payments of €3.1 billion a year stretching into the middle of the next decade, these notes are going to impose a far greater burden on the Irish people than the remaining unsecured Anglo bonds which receive a lot more attention.

Many will have heard Alan Ahearne on Morning Ireland explain why we should try to work our way out of the crisis by ’sticking to the plan’.  He clearly believes that the Eurozone will survive in its present form and that the costs of Ireland defaulting and/or unilaterally leaving the currency union would far outweigh the benefits.

In their recent ESRI publication, John FitzGerald  and Ide Kearney set out in some detail why they believe the Irish debt problem is manageable and why we should should stick to the plan.  This was already posted by Philip Lane and has been discussed here.

Nouriel Roubini, on the other hand, believes that ’sticking to the plan’ has no chance of working in Greece, so it should organize an orderly default and re-introduce the drachma. Some of the arguments he makes are compelling and many of them apply with some force to Ireland, especially the difficulty of restoring competitiveness and growth through a deflationary internal devaluation.

We need to evaluate the prospects for the Eurozone and our place in it.

Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers has written a paper on mortgage relief Designing a Debt Relief programme with minimal moral hazard to address the Irish household debt overhang. You can access the paper here.

The household debt restructuring (I’m not going to use the ‘f’ word) debate rumbles on. From the blanket coverage in the Sunday papers, Colm McCarthy’s Sindo post and Stephen Donnelly’s pieces were, I think, the best. For context, earlier in the week Seamus Coffey looked at the numbers in arrears from the Central Bank. From Colm’s article:

It would be wrong to dismiss the ‘forgiveness’ campaign as just a silly season space-filler revved up by a woolly-minded media. There is a real problem for many people and some mortgage debt will have to be written down. You cannot get blood out of a stone.

The danger is that the campaign will encourage everyone in negative equity to disguise themselves as stones and to lobby politicians for relief from debts that they are able to service. The politicians need to understand that debt relief, beyond the minimum necessary to acknowledge that some people simply cannot pay, comes at the expense of a bankrupt Exchequer. Do they really want to go to the IMF/EU looking for a further loan to recapitalise the banks yet again?

The best way to proceed is for all banks to be treated equally, regardless of ownership, and encouraged to write down mortgage debt that cannot realistically be serviced. The process will not be left entirely to the bankers, in whom public confidence remains weak, and it makes sense to have active oversight from the Financial Regulator to ensure, for example, that there is no preferential treatment for favoured borrowers, such as bank staff.

Debt write-downs should be expedited where these are unavoidable and extra staff assigned to the task. A modernised personal bankruptcy code would help and legislation has been promised.

I agree with Colm’s assessment of the situation. With the date of the expert group’s report hurtling towards us, it might be useful to consider a few worked examples of debt restructuring as and when they become important to us. Here is a google spreadsheet considering those cases.

I chose just one restructuring instrument, a debt/equity swop, although there are many others. See appendix 2 of the MARP report for worked examples internationally. The headings of the spreadsheet should take you through the logic of the examples.

First off, these are archetypal cases made up to make some points about types of mortgages in difficulty, so they are subject to a series of assumptions I detail in the spreadsheet. They are not meant to be anything other than exemplars, though they are driven by real life cases I’m familiar with. Anybody wishing to improve the ‘reality’ of the examples, by including interest and arrears for example, or another debt restructuring mechanism, please have a go on google docs and I’ll link to your examples in the comments.

Second off, it’s pretty clear from the spreadsheet that very few cases actually qualify for some kind of restructuring. Of the 6 cases, only 2 mortgages are deemed ’sustainable’ when the bank takes a 45% equity stake, and only 1 is sustainable when the bank takes a 35% stake. So, under the present set of arrangements, the rest of these mortgages would most likely end up becoming court cases, with the attendant stresses on household and society, and the possibility of the bank recouping only the secured asset. If, and it’s a big if, these examples are any guide to reality at all, an efficient personal insolvency mechanism is clearly the first step towards resolving the debt crisis, with a subset receiving some form of restructuring.

It’s clear there is a need for an efficient filter to decide, based on individual circumstances, which mortgages aren’t sustainable, which are, and which might be, given other considerations.

In practice, here’s how I see such a filter working.

1. The process is done through the banks but supervised by the regulator. Another quango or NAMA we really don’t need. Banks are best placed to work things out with their borrowers, but they should be supervised–especially the uncovered banks and subprimes but most importantly the ‘pillars’. A metric agreed by both sides on the debt profile of the individual lender and borrower should be constructed.
2. The implementation should be a menu of options available to the bank, one of which *must* be used depending on the outcome of a series of tests for income, etc., applied in stage 1. The penalty for misrepresenting yourself to the bank should be fraud charges. Cute hoors need not apply in other words. This will reduce the moral hazard element enormously.
3. This menu will include: straight out bankruptcy, debt/equity swops, repayment rescheduling, debt writedowns in cases where the banks have clearly acted inappropriately, giving the house back to bank in full and final settlement but renting the same house again, and more.

The principle, I feel, should be means tested income streams plus arrears rather than negative equity. Each menu item (a, b, c, etc.,) will come from an individual pot of money in the banks (e, f, g, etc.), all overseen by the regulator in a monthly report to them.
4. The objective is to be fair to both parties (lender and borrower) while allowing people to get on with their lives. The perspective, in some sense, is social welfare rather than letting banks or borrowers off the hook. Understanding you’ll never get this just right is key.
5. The guidelines should have the force of a directive on the banks from the regulator, eg it should remove a lot of the discretion from the banks and add clarity to the process while differentiating between ‘can’t pay’ and ‘won’t pay’ and ‘might pay’ and ‘will never pay’.

Update: Karl’s Business and Finance piece this month is excellent on this issue.

The transcripts from last week’s meetings of the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform are now online. The transcript for Michael Noonan’s appearance is here. The Honohan-Elderfield transcript is here. I’m happy to say the website has improved since the last Dail and you can now read the transcript for a full meeting without having to hit lots of arrow buttons.

The latest quarterly report on mortgage arrears from the Central Bank is available here. The report shows the fastest increase yet in the fraction of mortgages that are more than 90 days in arrears. This fraction rose from 6.3 percent in March to 7.2 percent in June, compared with increases of about six tenths of a percentage point in the previous quarters.

55,763 mortgage accounts have been in arrears for more than 90 days, of which 40,040 are in arrears over 180 days. In addition, 69,837 mortgages have been restructured with 39,395 mortgages that have been restructured but which are classified as performing and not in arrears and 30,442 again in arrears. These figures raise questions about whether the type of light restructurings that the Irish banks have been applying to distressed mortgages are sufficient to deal with the problem.

Morgan has a new working paper titled “A Note on the Size Distribution of Irish Mortgages”.  From the conclusions

Our analysis here has shown that instead of 10,000 million plus mortgages, there were probably fewer than 2,000 and these were mostly for investment rather than own home mortgages. However, looking at the 11,000 largest mortgages from the bubble peak of 2006-08, we find that the total is €9 billion. We do not know how many people held more than one mortgage, but it does not seem implausible that the total indebtedness of the 10,000 people with the largest mortgage debt is in the region of €10 billion.

Morgan uses statistical methods to estimate the number of mortgages valued at over €1 million because the Department of the Environment do not make these data available.

While the question of how many mortgages there are over €1 million is not particularly important, it might be worthwhile for the Central Bank or CSO to make available more detailed figures on the size distribution of mortgages. As there are quite a few banks in the Irish mortgage market, the usual argument about confidentiality hardly applies as an issue when releasing aggregate figures.

From today’s Irish Times,

Debt-forgiveness scheme not a realistic option, says Hayes

THE GOVERNMENT is set to resist growing calls for a debt forgiveness scheme for homeowners in mortgage distress.

Minister of State for Finance Brian Hayes said yesterday a proposal to write off up to €6 billion in personal mortgage debt was not a realistic option.

A spokesman for Minister for Finance Michael Noonan also indicated such a scheme was highly unlikely …. Mr Hayes, however, said there were “two huge problems” with the proposal.

“With any debt forgiveness, it will raise questions of fairness for people paying 100 per cent of their mortgages who are not getting any help from the State. It’s a huge issue for that group, who are already straddled with huge mortgages and who have not sought debt forgiveness.

“Secondly, the Government has put huge store behind the two pillar banks. To introduce debt forgiveness totalling €6 billion at a time when the Government is bringing those banks out of the A&E wards would be very difficult to justify,” he said.

These comments strike me as odd when one considers the underlying policy towards the Irish banks set out in the Financial Measures Programme (FMP) report, released last March and compiled with extensive (and expensive!) input from international consultants.

When Mr. Hayes talks about the “huge store behind the two pillar banks” I’m guessing he’s referring to the money being used to recapitalise them. Well, the recapitalisation requirements for these banks were dictated by the findings of the FMP report. 

The report estimates total lifetime losses on the €74.4 billion owner-occupied mortgage portfolio for AIB\BoI\EBS\ILP at €5.7 billion in their base case and €10.2 billion in the stress scenario. These loss estimates were then used to come up with the capital requirements for each bank, most of which has been met by putting public money into the banks.

For those who say that they don’t think that their money should be used to help write down other people’s mortgage debt, there’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that it’s already happened.  The taxpayer injections from the NPRF are covering mortgage debts that won’t be paid back. The good news is also that it’s already happened, i.e. implementing a debt relief programme won’t involve any additional costs to taxpayers over and above those already announced.

What this means is that the banks are sitting on mortgage losses that will be around €6 billion even if the economy recovers in line with the government’s projections.  This €6 billion represents debt that simply will not be paid back and taxpayer funds have already been injected to cover these losses.  At present, however, the banks are preferring to write these losses off as slowly as possible.  But whether the day of writing down is put off some more or whether the banks actively engage in a write-down programme, these losses are being incurred.

Brian Hayes may believe that the “extend and pretend” approach currently being adopted, while failing to resolve the debt nightmares of many citizens, is at least beneficial for the health of the Irish banks.  I don’t believe this to be correct.

A number of international financiers that I have spoken to recently have expressed serious disappointment at the slow speed with which Ireland is moving to write down mortgage debt. Their attitude is that they could deal with the Irish banks if they could see evidence that mortgage losses will indeed be limited to about €6 billion. However, at present, they do not see any “workout model” in place for dealing with Irish mortgage debt.  In the absence of seeing how such a model will operate, they will continue to be nervous about the size of the unexploded “mortgage bomb.”

What this means is that it will be beneficial for both the banks and their distressed customers to get on with implemented a well-designed debt relief programme. Indeed, prior to the comments from Brian Hayes and Mr. Noonan’s spokesman, I was under the impression that the government would implement such a policy. Certainly, the public statements of Jonathan McMahon, head of banking supervision at the Central Bank, indicate a preference for the banks to get on with writing down with bad loans.

What should a well-designed mortgage write-down programme look like? Brian Hayes raises the issue of fairness as if nobody has ever thought about this before. In truth, a lot of thought and effort has gone into dealing with personal debt problems around the world and there is a lot to learn from. We’ve also been discussing it on this site for a long time, e.g. this post I wrote eighteen months ago.

A well-designed programme needs to deal with mortgages on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, this can involve modifications of mortgages in bilateral deals between banks and their customers. In some cases, those who get modified mortgages will get to stay in their homes. In other cases, they will not.

In more serious cases, a process of negotiations between debtors and their creditors will be required, i.e. a personal bankruptcy procedure. The revised EU-IMF programme from April (page 15) contains a commitment to introduce a revised personal bankruptcy regime as well as a new non-judicial debt settlement and enforcement system. It claimed then that discussions were ongoing and would be completed shortly.

In light of the EU-IMF commitments on debt regimes, the stress test results and recapitalisation, and the stated approach of the Central Bank, I think the comments from Mr. Hayes about the inability to write down €6 billion in mortgage debt are unfortunate.

Let’s hope there is more progress being made on this issue than these narrow-minded comments suggest.

I’d written the comments below before seeing Stephen’s post on this, so I’m not trying to correct anything in it, just adding my own two cents.

I didn’t attend Morgan Kelly’s talk at ISNE yesterday so all I know about it is what I’ve read in today’s newspapers (e.g. this piece in the Irish Times) in which Morgan is quoted as saying “We are talking sums in the region of €5 billion to €6 billion which would be necessary to spend on mortgage forgiveness”. This evening, I heard a piece on RTE’s Drivetime in which Brendan Burgess of askaboutmoney.com was questioning various figures that were attributed to Morgan and arguing that Morgan was unnecessarily scaring people about the scale of mortgage defaults.

I’d like to make two (hopefully) clarifying points on this issue. First, the sizes of the owner-occupied and buy-to-let mortgage books for Irish properties of the four guaranteed Irish banks are not something that there needs to be any disagreement about, as the balances as of December 31 last year were published in the Financial Measures Programme (FMP) report of March 31 (page 19).

Second, rather than being a scary figure, Morgan’s estimate of between €5 billion and €6 billion for a substantial mortgage relief programme is, if anything, a bit low relative to what the Central Bank’s figures in the FMP report indicate is necessary.

On the size of mortgage books, here are the facts. As of December 31 last year, BoI, AIB, EBS and INBS had a combined €97.7 billion in Irish residential mortgages with €74.4 billion being owner-occupied and €23.3 being buy-to-let (Table 7, page 19 of FMP report).

On estimates of losses on the owner-occupied portion of Irish residential mortgages, the FMP estimates total lifetime losses on the €74.4 billion portfolio at €5.7 billion in their base case and €10.2 billion in the stress scenario. The amount of these losses to be realised over the next three years is estimated to be €3.5 billion in the base scenario and €5.7 billion in the stress scenario (see Table 9 on page 23).

This shows that Morgan’s estimate of between €5 billion and €6 billion corresponds to either the lifetime losses assumed by the Central Bank in the base case or the three-year losses associated with the stress case.

As I said above, I don’t know how Morgan came about his figures but the five to six billion figure for mortgage writedowns seems to me to be in line with the Central Bank’s official policy.

Furthermore, my reading of statements by Jonathan McMahon, head of banking supervision at the Central Bank (e.g. here and here) is that he is keen to see the banks get on with implementing debt writedowns that are in line with the Bank’s assumptions about mortgage losses. The banks have been recapitalised under the assumption that the losses in the FMP base case are going to occur, so it is surely time to start dealing with this problem.

Perhaps rather than have an unnecessary debate about figures that are actually published and can’t really be disputed, Morgan’s talk can serve as a useful starting point for a debate about exactly how mortgage debt write-downs should be implemented.

A little bit more detail has emerged (via press interviews rather than detailed technical documents) about the Nama property price insurance scheme as it is currently proposed. The basic design was leaked to the press in early July, and was discussed in my earlier thread. The emerging details of the scheme as announced so far are not reassuring. The scheme has considerable potential to manipulate recorded property sales prices, to damage confidence in Irish property market openness, and to build up a hidden future cash flow liability for Irish taxpayers. The motivation given by Nama for implementing the scheme is not entirely convincing.

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In his Sunday Independent column today, Colm McCarthy again makes the argument the Government is protecting – or being forced to protect – senior bondholders in order to protect European banks. 

It is entirely fair for our European partners to observe that we have brought this on ourselves but it is equally fair to note that in picking up the tab, the Irish are ‘taking one for the team’, in the phrase of Sharon Bowles, the British MEP who chairs the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. The team, in the form of the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the Franco-German political leadership, persist in the pretence that the protection of creditors of the bust Irish banks, at the expense of the Irish Exchequer, represents some form of generosity to Irish citizens and taxpayers.

Fortunately, the existing deal with our European partners is impractical as well as unfair. It has not worked, it will not work and there will be further rounds of modifications as Europe gropes towards a resolution of the banking and sovereign debt crises. It will not be enough, in regaining solvency, for the Irish Government to avoid further pay-offs to bondholders in Anglo and Irish Nationwide. The Irish Exchequer’s contributions to bank rescue have already destroyed the sovereign’s capacity to borrow. There is still an opportunity to avoid default on the sovereign debt of the state, but the ability to avoid this outcome is being undermined by the obligations undertaken to investors in bonds issued by insolvent banks.

The restoration of that ability requires, in addition to vigorous reductions in the budget deficit, that the remaining costs of rescuing the Irish banks be shared with their creditors and with the European institutions whose defence of bank bondholders has helped to create the current untenable situation.

Putting aside the relative costs to Ireland’s creditworthiness of defaulting on sovereign bonds compared to sovereign guarantees, oversimplified claims that senior bondholders are being protected to protect foreign banks are undermining support for necessary fiscal adjustments.  

The concerns of the ECB about balance sheet/precedent-related contagion does explain the absence of loss sharing for the roughly €3.5 billion of unguarnateed seniors in the defunct and depositor-less Anglo and INBS.   The constraints on loss sharing in the pillar banks are quite different. 

There is an effective instrument to impose losses on pillar-bank bondholders – bankruptcy.    Although we know the credit system is already impaired, making the pillar banks bankrupt would impair the credit (and payments) system to a significantly greater degree.   Also, it is conveniently ignored that depositors rank equally with senior bondholders under current law.    It might have been possible for the State to make depositors whole when the State was creditworthy.   That ship has sailed. 

Now I do think more should have been done early on to put in place a resolution regime to increase loss-sharing options.  However,  the legal avenues appear to be quite proscribed.    While I am not saying this is the end of the argument, given the damage done to public support for tough fiscal measures, anyone who pushes the line that losses should be imposed on broader bondholders has an obligation to explain how the legal obstacles could be overcome while protecting the credit system and protecting depositors.    It is emotionally satisfying to heap blame on a requirement to protect foreign banks.  The reality is more complex.

The most recent Financial Stability Report from the Bank of England warns about the danger to U.K. economic stability from excessive debt forbearance by U.K. domestic banks. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, put stress on this risk in his speech introducing the report (although he also noted that this does not mean that forbearance is always a bad thing). In the report, only the potential UK fallout from the Euro crisis ranks more highly than excessive debt forbearance on the list of risks to the UK banking system. This should ring alarm bells in Ireland, since the level of debt forbearance in Ireland at present is much higher than in the U.K.  Encouraging debt forbearance is a deliberate Irish government policy, and the extreme level of forbearance by domestic Irish institutions is storing up potential problems for the future.

There is a considerable overhang of unwanted or distressed (in some cases unfinished) property assets in Ireland (see Ronan Lyons and Namawinelake for discussion). The smart-money players (foreign-owned banks with Irish property assets) might front-run the slower-footed players (domestic, taxpayer-owned banks and Nama) by selling relatively quickly, leaving the Irish taxpayer to fund any eventual shortfall. (I am including the IBRC, the vestiges of Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide, in my definition of domestic banks.) So loan forbearance and front-running in Irish property markets could interact to the detriment of taxpayers.   

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Rte reports that private investors will put €1.123 billion into Bank of Ireland in exchange for a large(ish) stake in the company, given the size of their investments. The Department of Finance press release is here. Is this a good deal for the taxpayer? Non-Nazi related comments most welcome.

The European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund have passed Ireland with flying colours in their latest quarterly review. I’ll post audio of their press conference when it’s available (commenters please drop the link if you see it). The IMF press release is here.

The statement reads that bank reforms are on track, fiscal consolidation is on track, structural reforms are to come, and it’s all good. Lots of touchy-feely language. Those pesky bond markets, and the burning of senior bondholders, weren’t looked too kindly upon in questions, but overall the message seemed to be: Nothing to see here, nothing at all, no to burning senior bondholders, but guess what lads, the next review will be tougher. Stick with the programme.

On twitter, NamaWinelake reported a divergence between the EU and IMF, with Ajay Chopra of the IMF saying he expected to see a more robust approach to burden sharing, while the ECB representative said no, that wouldn’t be happening.  Although much can be made of comments like this, the review exercise seems to be, on balance, a qualified success. The government did meet its agreed targets. Whether the exercise enhances our credibility to the point that Ireland can wean itself off EU and IMF funds without a second loan package is another question entirely.

Congratulations to regular commenter Dreaded Estate for producing this spreadsheet comparing sales prices at last week’s Allsop auction with the earliest available asking prices. Across the 46 properties for which previous asking prices could be found, the weighted average discount relative to the earliest asking price was 69 percent.

One can complain about this small sample (though Namawinelake points us to this map, showing a nice geographical mix) and also about extrapolating from the prices recorded at these kinds of “fire sale” auction. However, my inclination is that this is useful information about where the property market is likely to bottom out.  (Of course, even with seventy percent discounts, most people will still need to find a bank willing to give them a mortgage to buy a house.)

In today’s Irish Times, Fiona Reddan has an interesting short article about Nama’s planned mortgage-enhancement scheme. The scheme is intended to unload some of Nama’s large inventory of houses and flats without unduly lowering property prices.  The scheme, at least as it has been described so far, will work as follows.  Suppose that Nama wants to sell a particular flat for €100,000.  It will offer a buyer the following deal. The purchaser must put down €10,000 in cash, and take out a mortgage from a bank for €72,000.  Nama will pay (itself) the remaining €18,000 and record the flat as sold at 10,000+72,000+18,000 = €100,000.  If after an initial period, say five years, the fair market value of  the house is more than €82,000 (the amount already paid by the homeowner) than the homeowner must “top up” the difference to a maximum of €18,000.  If the fair-market value of the house is €82,000 or less at this date, the homeowner has no need to pay the remainder. (more…)

The Central Bank has continued its excellent work in making more statistical data available with two new releases “Trends in Business Credit and Deposits” and “Trends in Personal Credit and Deposits“. I don’t have time to get into a detailed discussion of these releases but, on a quick look, there appears to be lots of new and interesting information in these releases.

My invitation to the above event at the week-end being unaccountably delayed, it’s interesting to see the Irish Times relaying the views of colleague Professor Terrence McDonough (IT do note correct spelling please.) here.

In summary:

“He said the country should default on its debt, leave the euro, build a single public bank, provide a jobs guarantee for all workers and nationalise the Corrib gas field.”

For the latest update on the government’s position on Anglo debt, I recommend this post from NAMA Wine Lake.

Hans-Werner Sinn replies to his critics in relation to Target 2 balances here.  Readers of this blog will undoubtedly draw their own conclusions.  At the heart of his fallacy is the conceptual  absurdity of separate regional credit policies in  a monetary union with perfect capital mobility.

The FT reports on Minister Noonan’s IMF initiative here.   I would be interested in reactions to the Minister’s tactics.

“When we were faced with a similar situation after coming into government, we agreed with the ECB and we held back from burden sharing with senior bond holders and we didn’t proceed down that road.”

Michael Noonan, reported here.

It wouldn’t be altogether surprising, I suppose, if the most conservative party in the State agreed with the ECB when it came to the distribution of bank losses as between ordinary taxpayers and financial institutions. But this isn’t the story we have been told to date.

So: does Fine Gael — and Labour — agree with the ECB regarding burden sharing with bondholders?

Update: Michael Noonan has said that Anglo and Irish Nationwide senior bondholders should face losses.

Thanks to grumpy for drawing our attention to a fascinating segment with Patrick Honohan on last night’s Tonight with Vincent Browne show.   (The segment runs from minute 17:40 to minute 36:12; you can read grumpy’s comment here.)  Governor Honohan made an unfortunate reference to “the people” in relation to the blocking of attempts to impose losses on senior bondholders, giving fodder for conspiracy theories.   But I don’t think there is much of a mystery about the people in question.    The ECB clearly worried — and continues to worry — about balance-sheet contagion across the European banking system, and (I would suppose even more importantly) the implications of the precedent of withdrawing the implicit guarantee for senior debt for the funding of a system that continues to be fragile.  

On the Irish side, given the existence of the ELG guarantee on post-December 2009 bank funding, the equal ranking of depositors and senior bondholders, and the systemic importance of AIB and Bank of Ireland to Ireland’s credit and payment systems, a pragmatic decision was made that the fiscal savings from feasible loss imposition (most likely the remaining unguaranteed senior debt in Anglo and INBS) would not be worth risking the reliability of large-scale funding from the eurosystem. 

(It is worth noting that a special resolution regime was not in place, and even if it was the U.K. example shows U.S.-style depositor preference is considered incompatible with European law.   In principle it would have been possible for losses to be shared between depositors and senior bondholders, with the State making depositors whole.   But at that stage the State had lost its creditworthiness, making it hard to see how such depositor protection could have been implemented without significant outside support.   Lastly, both Anglo and INBS still had depositors back in November.   The Credit Institutions (Stabilisation) Act later facilitated the movement of depositors out of those banks, but that piece of legislation – which made it possible to impose proper losses on subordinated bond holders – is unlikely to be costless in terms of the longer-term reputation of the stability of Ireland’s investment environment.)

I think reasonable people can disagree about whether more should have been done to force the issue back in November with senior bondholders.    But I find it hard to understand the certitude with which the policy course is criticised given the very real constraints that were faced.   At this stage, I feel the obsession with the “socialisation of bank losses” is becoming a substitute for hard thinking about what we need to do now to get through a crisis that still poses massive downside risk.

Update: Namawinelake provides a transcript of the key segment with Governor Honohan: see here. 

Here.

Paul Krugman points to the gap between Icelandic and Irish CDS spreads here.

One thought that I should have put in my, em, original Sinn post is the following.

Sinn and others believe that the Target 2 balances show that ECB operations have created a big risk for the German taxpayer, channelling lots of funds from Germany to Ireland. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite.

The big change in Target 2 balances in recent years shows that German banks were huge beneficiaries of ECB operations. Without the intervention of the ECB, there is no way that the Irish banks or the government that backed them would have been able to pay back the huge amounts they owed German banks.

So the ECB operations allowed the German banks to turn hugely risky loans to Irish banks into completely safe deposits with the Bundesbank (the Bundesbank’s Target 2 balances are the mirror image of these deposits). Now, of course, Germany will share 28% of the credit risk stemming from these operations. But the rest of the Eurosystem has taken on 72% of the risk of operations that have hugely benefited German banks and the taxpayers that would have had to recapitalise them in the absence of the ECB operations.