Breakfast with Nouriel Roubini

The FT profiles ‘Dr Realist’ – you can read it here.

How to Deflate Property Bubbles

The Economics Focus slot in this week’s Economist covers various policy interventions that can help to deflate property bubbles – you can read it here.

More on Bank Executive Pay

The comedy of errors continues.

From a recent Irish Times article by the forensic and understated Colm Keena: “Lenihan said he was going to seek a cap of 500,000 euro on the salaries of the chief executives of Bank of Ireland and AIB… When the then governor of the Bank of Ireland wrote to Lenihan about Boucher’s pay arrangements, he suggested pay of 500,000 euro and a “pension cash allowance” of 123,000 euro. The Minister did not want the new chief executive getting any allowance that had been criticised in the (Covered Institution Remuneration Oversight) Committee report, and the amount ended up being rolled into a salary of 623,000 euro. Ironically, this appears to have been an improvement in Boucher’s terms, as the salary amount is pensionable, while the cash allowance is not”.

An Academic Economist’s Perspective on the EU – Greek Bailout: Some Potential Flaws in the Proposed Policy

There are a variety of perspectives on the EU bailout of Greek sovereigns, but from the perspective of an academic economist (at least this one) the proposed bailout has some potential flaws that are quite fundamental.

2004 FOMC Transcripts

Not quite Irish Economy but of interest to anyone wondering how we got here. Calculated Risk discusses the newly released 2004 transcripts of FOMC meetings. Signs of a housing bubble are already clear. CR digs out a chart presented to the FOMC showing the yield on housing relative to long term real Treasury yields and then extends the chart to show what happened after 2004.  CR also shows how the housing yield chart would have looked using the usually preferred Case-Shiller index.