A VOX audio interview with me is available here.
Category: Uncategorized
Title: Mobile Banking Initiatives in South Asia: Preliminary Thoughts
Speaker: Veronica Cacdac Warnock, Darden Business School, University of Virginia, Senior Lecturer and Batten Fellow
Date: Monday 24th of October 2011
Time: 1-2pm
Venue: IIIS Seminar Room, 6th Floor of the Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
SHORT BIO:
Veronica Cacdac Warnock is Senior Lecturer and Batten Institute Fellow at the Darden Business School of the University of Virginia (UVA). Her research focuses on housing finance and inclusive banking. She has served as academic consultant for organizations including the National Association of Realtors, the World Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements, and has held visiting positions at the Asian Institute of Management and the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. She is currently advisor to “Housing Finance in Latin America and the Caribbean”, a research project at Inter-American Development Bank, and to ShoreBank International’s consulting projects supporting new Mobile Banking for the Poor ventures of commercial banks in Pakistan and Bangladesh. At Darden, she co-teaches Markets in Human Hope, a course in which students form private ventures to directly address global development problems. She has also taught urban economics and development courses at UVA. Previously, she was Director/Senior Economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association (of America) and Research Associate at Haver Analytics. Dr. Warnock received her Ph.D. in Economics from Fordham University and her A.B. in Economics from Ateneo de Manila University.
New mortgage lending in Ireland in 2011 is on course to set record lows, with the number of new mortgages lower than any year back to the early 1970s. The conventional wisdom is that this is due to a temporary reluctance on the part of Irish domestic banks to issue normal amounts of normal-quality residential mortgages. Under this conventional view, Irish domestic banks must currently pass up otherwise profitable mortgage opportunities because of the banks’ temporary shortage of liquidity and the need to shrink their balance sheets. They are operating under a liquidity constraint. They cannot issue many residential mortgages even though they would profit from doing so. In the circumstances they are rationing their constrained liquidity, only issuing unusually high-quality (that is, super-safe) “gold-plated” residential mortgages to the first tier of very-low-risk applicants. Under this conventional view, once liquidity in the Irish domestic banks is back to normal, the banks will return to issuing normal amounts of normal quality mortgages, servicing a much broader range of customers.
The conventional view may be correct, but I wonder? Is it possible instead that the “normal” Irish residential mortgage is gone forever? Might the “gold-plated” mortgages of 2011 become the only ones available? If so, there are many policy implications, hence it is advisable to consider the possibility. I will give three reasons for speculating that “normal” Irish mortgage contracts might not come back until after Godot.
This speech by Ben Broadbent is a good explanation of the economics of how real depreciation is important in the rebalancing of the UK economy. Essay question: compare and contrast to the adjustment mechanism inside a monetary union.
This new Central Bank technical paper by Colin Bermingham and Thomas Conefrey seeks to establish the relation between external demand shocks and mortgage delinquencies in Ireland.