The media have decided that one of the headline conclusions of the Honohan report was that “Honohan supported the September 2008 guarantee” and the government have been very keen to consistently repeat that line.
Amid all the coverage of the banking reports and the other ongoing political stories, very little coverage has been devoted to the fact that the bond markets are again turning less and less positive about Irish sovereign debt.
Today’s NTMA bond auction (press release here) saw it borrowing €1.5 billion, equally split between a bond maturing in 2016 and a bond maturing in 2018. The NTMA press release stresses the fact that the auctions had bids of three times the amount offered. However, look at the yields. As the RTE website points out “The average yield on the 2016 bond rose to 4.521% from 3.663% at the last comparable auction in April and the 2018 bond had a yield of 5.088% from 4.55% last August.”
On the secondary market, the yield on ten year bonds has now given up most of the large decline that occurred after the May 9 announcement of the EU stabilisation fund. In fact, the FT are reporting that, as of yesterday, the spread over bunds stood at 281 basis points, relative to 319 basis points on Friday May 7, and yields are up another 20 or so basis points so far today.
What’s odd, of course, as Paul Krugman has been pointing out is that these developments have not stopped the constant references, both here and abroad, to how well regarded Ireland is by participants in international financial markets.
To be fair, I think there are a few cross-currents here that go beyond the essential point that Krugman is trying to make. I would echo Krugman’s concerns about the effects of imposing fiscal austerity too soon. The budget deficit for the Eurozone as a whole is projected to be 6.6 percent of GDP this year, so to my mind the need for generalised fiscal contraction today is overstated in light of the weakness of the Euro area economy. However, the bond market’s attitude to Ireland’s position is such that the Irish government has little choice but to adopt an austerity program, a point that Krugman has conceded before.
Furthermore, I’m sure that financial market participants are impressed by the fiscal retrenchment obtained so far. But, at the end of the day, the bond yields give us their judgment on the sustainability of our situation and it’s a thumbs down. The high yields being imposed on us reflect the scale of the initial hole we dug for ourselves as well as policies that maximized the cost to the state of the banking crisis.
An international and interdisciplinary conference on regulatory governance is being held at UCD next week, 17-19 June, under the auspices of the European Consortium of Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance. There will be more than 200 papers presented. Streams include 8 panels on regulation and the financial crisis, and also streams on regulating for sustainability, the politics of regulation, the governance of risk and technology regulation, non-state regulation and regulating network industries. A variety of disciplines are represented, including political science, socio-legal studies, business and economics. The programme, including details of registration, is available on the conference website. The conference papers are being uploaded to this site also and are freely available.
This report is available here.
You can download the report here.