Six months ago on this blog I made a quasi-prediction that the number of new residential mortgages in Ireland might shrink to zero-plus-noise. Arguably this has now happened. I claim no great insight and concede that it might have been dumb luck. My quasi-prediction was based on some informal liquidity-risk analysis of the Irish banks. The banks are in a corner solution with respect to long-term illiquid assets. There is little good reason for an Irish-domiciled bank to issue a new residential mortgage, rather, they might be keen to sell any of their existing long-term illiquid assets at a loss. This has only second-order policy importance relative to Greece, etc., but is worth documenting.
Category: Economics
This really is one for the textbooks.
In announcing its 80/20 negative equity insurance scheme, Nama management could have, but did not, provide estimates of the implicit cost of the insurance component of the package product. The cost is hidden in the package sales prices, which Nama management describe as “fair value prices” for the property. With a bit of work, it is possible to reverse-engineer the insurance-component cost from the scanty information provided by Nama.
I have written about this before, twice, but now some more details have emerged and the Nama scheme has gone live. Nama has announced that it will providing “free” insurance against price falls for selected properties, in order to help sell its Irish residential property portfolio.
From the information provided, it seems Nama will hide the insurance premium in the recorded property sales price, thereby simultaneously distorting Nama’s published accounts, CSO property sales price statistics, and the soon-to-be-released property price sales registry.
Wonkish paragraph: Hiding the insurance premium in this way also has a knock-on effect on the “moneyness” of the embedded option. Since the actual sales price includes a hidden insurance premium, and the eventual valuation of the property (used to determine the insurance pay-out) does not include any insurance premium, the insurance scheme is immediately “in the red” as soon as the property is sold. Nama has to hope for price increases, not just the absence of decreases, in order to claw back the embedded insurance premium which is hidden in the distorted sales price. This knock-on effect can be quite substantial.
When teaching economic history a question that frequently arises in the classroom is: do governments make policy based on interests, or do ideas also matter? Is it the case, as George Stigler once wrote about the UK’s move towards free trade in 1846, that
Economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live. . . . If Cobden had spoken only Yiddish, and with a stammer, and Peel had been a narrow, stupid man, England would have moved toward free trade in grain as its agricultural classes declined and its manufacturing and commercial classes grew
Or is Keynes’ famous line about ideas, written in the 1930s, and which is now such a cliché that I can’t bring myself to reproduce it here, more accurate?
This distinction between interests and ideas seems to me to be potentially quite important now, in the context of the EMU crisis.
You sometimes hear the argument made that in the final analysis, the Germans will give in on Eurobonds and the like, since the costs to them of allowing EMU to break down would be so enormous. This is an interest-based, rational choice prediction. But what if the Germans are advocating generalized austerity and internal devaluation in the periphery, not just because they don’t want to bail out other countries, or accept a higher rate of inflation in Germany, but because they genuinely believe that this is what is required in order to solve the crisis? What if they genuinely believe that there are no macroeconomic problems, only microeconomic problems? I think that there is plenty of evidence in favour of this view, and the German chapter in this book helps place it in its historical context. In this case, I don’t see any reason to be optimistic about where this crisis is heading: we can expect to see plenty more headlines about collapsing output, rising unemployment, and political radicalization in the months and years ahead, and eventually something will give.
Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true.