The Irish Economy

Before he became über-famous for his history of finance, The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson made his name in academia writing ‘counterfactual histories‘. Counterfactual histories are essentially ‘what ifs’, changing the outcome of one or two pivotal events, and taking history for a ride to see where subsequent events take you. A great example is what would have happened if Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t taken a bullet to the neck in June 1914 from Gavrilo Princip. Would World War 2 have started? Another cool example is the effect on bridge engineering if ‘Galloping Gertie’ hadn’t collapsed in 1940. Counterfactuals are useful because they allow us to explore the ramifications of what might have happened in the light of what actually happened.

Every citizen in the State has probably sat down at some point asked themselves what might have happened if the late Brian Lenihan hadn’t handed out the blanket guarantee in September 2008 that put the taxpayer on the line for the banks’ many failures. Everyone wonders what would have happened if the Regulator had done his job properly during the years of the construction bubble. And everyone on this blog, I’m sure, has wondered what the outcome would have been if we had burned some of the senior bondholders in bust banks like Anglo long before now.

Official wisdom, as handed down from the ECB as recently as yesterday, holds that confidence in the banking system is more important than individual banks’ liabilities. So the taxpayer must be put on the hook for those liabilities in extremis. Serious people the length and breadth of the country queued up to endorse this policy. If you didn’t–especially if you were an economist–you were being irresponsible and extremist.

The official position has changed slightly. Now it’s just not worth it. We’d lose the ‘confidence’ of the markets for a mere 100 million euros if we burned the remained 3 billion of unguaranteed seniors. I’m not the only one perplexed at how this number is reached.

Today’s Sindo column by Colm McCarthy puts nails in the coffins of the serious people and their preferred policy. The counterfactual element comes through in this piece quite strongly. Colm argues, clearly and simply, that paying off bondholders of bad debt warehouses when the country is bust and within an EU/IMF loan facility is bonkers, and that there is a different way. Read the whole thing, but here’s a key part:

It is unprecedented for bondholders in defunct banks to be paid by a country already in an IMF programme and unable to re-finance its own sovereign debt in the market.

It is an extra irritation to have to endure lectures from EU and ECB officials about their generosity to Ireland, as if the lucky beneficiaries were the Irish public.

The Irish Times interviewed departing ECB executive council member Juergen Stark and reported on Monday last: “He is dismissive of a renewed Government push to avoid repaying about €3.8bn of the senior debt in Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society. The ECB remains opposed to such an initiative and Stark says Ireland is ‘not autonomous to take this decision’. The question is a ‘non-issue’ for the bank.”

The phrasing is interesting. Ireland is “. . . not autonomous to take this decision”. The government of an EU member state, accountable to its electorate, is not free, according to Stark, to decide whether or not creditors in utterly insolvent and defunct banks, no longer trading and in wind-down, should be paid by a Government which has not guaranteed these debts. The funds to pay these bondholders are being provided by the IMF and EU, since the country cannot borrow elsewhere. Each payment adds to a debt mountain already so large as to threaten the ability to service the State’s own sovereign debt.

This column would have been heresy, even one year ago. Now let’s hope it contributes to a change in official policy with respect to the bondholders in Anglo, and perhaps in other banks. Colm closes his piece well, it’s worth quoting:

It is bad enough to have to “take one for the team” without acknowledgement. It is much worse to see the team lose the game so ingloriously.

Good news, it seems, from the Commission, allowing us to extend the maturities of our loans, and service them at much lower interest rates, essentially the cost of funds from the EFSM. It also looks like there will be a retrospective reduction (but that’s my reading of the text, I’m open to correction).

From the press release:

The Commission proposes to align the EFSM loan terms and conditions to those of the long standing the Balance of Payment Facility. Both countries should pay lending rates equal to the funding costs of the EFSM, i.e. reducing the current margins of 292.5 bps for Ireland and of 215 bps for Portugal to zero. The reduction in margin will apply to all instalments[sic], i.e. both to future and to already disbursed tranches.

Furthermore, the maturity of individual future tranches to these countries will be extended from the current maximum of 15 years to up to 30 years. As a result the average maturity of the loans to these countries from EFSM would go up from the current 7.5 years to up to 12.5 years.

Two comments. First, this is very welcome news, and well deserved given the levels of austerity we’ve endured and the cooperation the Irish State has given, relative to other EU countries. Second, were this proposal to come from the Irish side, rather than the Commission, in the current climate it would be seen as a call for a controlled default. The fact that we (and our Portugese cousins) are being allowed to do this shows that the EU Commission is aware that the sustainability of Ireland’s and Portugal’s public finances are in question, and they have decided to act decisively to change the probability of our finances becoming unsustainable in the medium term. So: a good news story for once. Commenters may have differing views, of course.

(Ht to Liam Delaney for showing me this)

I’ve seen various explanations for the 2008 crisis: global imbalances, dodgy financial innovations, lack of proper financial supervision, the interaction of all of the above. And a few others besides.

But this is a new one to me, I must confess.

This excellent post by Karl deserves a thread of its own.

This report from the Guardian is consistent with Thomas Klau’s argument that current eurozone governance arrangements are pushing “democratic debate and voters’ choices to the margins”. It also suggests that in the long run the present way of doing things will prove politically unsustainable, in a union of democratic states. Whether Klau’s preferred solution is likely to come about is another question entirely.

Reuters report Minister Noonan as saying:

“There is a commitment that if countries continue to fulfill the conditions of their program the European authorities will continue to supply them with money even when the program is concluded,” Noonan told Irish state broadcaster RTE.

“The commitment is now written in that if we are not back in the markets the European authorities will give us money until we get back in the markets.”

In the event that the State cannot fund itself on the open markets, this statement would seem to imply the Minister readily expects more cash than previously agreed with the EU, IMF, UK, and Sweden. But apparently that’s not a new bailout.

Presumably this statement was intended to reduce uncertainty about Ireland’s post-2013 funding position. But these statements inject more uncertainty.

The Minister expects there will be more cash if we are good boys and girls. Ok, I can accept that. But there are important follow on questions: That’s more cash, for the same terms? On different terms? Cash from whom, using what mechanism (EFSF/EFSM/IMF/Something else)?. When, if not in 2013, will Ireland return to the markets? Is there a Greece-style road map somewhere for Ireland?

Can we see it?

These are just some of the questions raised, on the night at Macgill Summer School we hear the Taoiseach proclaiming Ireland’s intention to repay all of its creditors. which, if we’re Greece 2.0, wouldn’t be correct at all.

Colm McCarthy writing on these, em, pages, a few days ago explained that Europe’s Plan A–no banks will go under, no states will default on their debts, fiscal consolidation plus recapitalisation will see us through–is being quietly dropped in favour of Plan B. Today at the EU Debt Summit we got a glimpse of what Plan B will look like. (updated to official version).

Briefly, Greece is being allowed to selectively default, but this won’t harm Greek banks (nor their French owners) because the greek bonds will be guaranteed by an enhanced European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) that can intervene in secondary markets amongst other new powers. Other debt-laden member states, including Ireland, will have access to cheaper funds from the uber-EFSF at longer maturities.

The markets liked it too, with bank shares enjoying a nice bounce. There’s some evidence the bounce we saw on the markets was just short equity positions being cleared out, so I wouldn’t take that too seriously as an indicator of how well this new plan will go down. I don’t think many people were surprised at Greece’s default. As macroeconomic events go, the default was pretty well expected, hence the lack of jitters when it was announced.

It is to be welcomed that the Greek default is somewhat orderly and buttressed by other member states’ guarantees to reduce (or avoid completely) balance sheet contagion. What’s not so welcome are some of the phrases used in the draft document. They are vague enough to allow lots of leeway should policy makers require it, but precise enough to guarantee action of some shape or form. All this does is move debate away from ‘what will they do’ to ‘how are they going to do it’, which is unhelpful given the seriousness of the situation. This is, after all, the tenth time EU leaders have met to sort the problems in Europe out ‘once and for all’.

Paragraph 7 of the draft contains the following rather ominous sentence:

To improve the effectiveness of the EFSF and address contagion, we agree to increase the flexibility of the EFSF, allowing it to:

- intervene on the basis of a precautionary programme, with adequate conditionality

That is really worrying language. Does it mean, for example, that the EFSF can require states to implement austerity measures without negotiation with the sovereign? The language is vague enough to be quite scary.

The composition of the new beefed up EFSF isn’t reported. The only place Italy is mentioned in the draft is to get a pat on the back for its recent fiscal consolidation. Is Italy, in its current fragile state, expected to keep its share of the EFSF up? Look at the table on page 1 of this document from the EFSF showing the contributions of member states. Italy is expected to pony up up to 78 billion euros if required. More information on just where this money is coming from would be most welcome.

Another slight worry is that Ireland has agreed to talk about the common consolidated corporate tax base (ccctb), meaning that perhaps there has been a movement in the government’s position on this issue, though agreeing to talk does not mean that Ireland’s corporation tax rate (a different beast) is under threat just yet.

All in all, a lot to discuss in today’s announcements, but I don’t personally feel the EU has solved its problems to the satisfaction of all, though commenters may of course disagree.

Colm is at his best in this Sindo column. Best bits:

Plan A has failed to create circumstances in which the three ‘rescued’ countries can return to the markets, the over-riding objective of any programme of official support. Their traded debt has collapsed in price and all three are rated junk by at least one of the bond-rating agencies. They will not be graduating from the programmes of official support anytime soon and the verdict of the markets, the only verdict that matters, is that Plan A is also junk.

The essence of Europe’s Plan A, as first applied to Greece, is to pretend that the problem is less serious than is actually the case, avoid any element of debt relief and insist that budgetary stringency alone will do the trick.

…

Persistence with Plan A and blaming the markets and ratings agencies is not a viable option should Spain and Italy go under. The game is up. Plan A is being quietly abandoned. In this sense, this has been a good week for Ireland.

..

Minister Noonan should now be seeking European support for an end to payments to holders of bonds, guaranteed or unguaranteed, in the Irish banks. Every cent paid to them is at the expense of the holders of Ireland’s sovereign debt, who have been treated in quite cavalier fashion at the behest of the European Central Bank and apparently in response to threats from this unique organisation.

ECB officials come and go but sovereign states need sovereign credit forever. It would be an unmitigated disaster if Ireland’s act of faith in Europe were to result in the first-ever default on the sovereign obligations of the State.

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.

The pre-2007 Irishman abroad in Europe had a little swagger to him. He thought his economy was a Tiger. When abroad in Europe, he spent like crazy, and generally annoyed his European counterparts with his brash ways. (Of course I’m not thinking of anyone in particular). The reverse is happening at the moment. We’re humble little chappies. My French and German friends are sending me emails with pictures of the Book of Kells saying ‘please take care of our investment’ and ‘are you enjoying your bailout?’ and ‘we’re still waiting for the thank you card’.

They’ll be waiting a while longer. When I say our European friends should be thanking us, they assume it’s a throwback to the hubris of pre-2007 Ireland or something to do with keeping eyes off the balance sheets of German and French banks. It’s not, and here’s just one reason why.

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