The Labour Party is hosting a conference on Saturday, 21 February in Dublin to discuss solutions to Ireland’s economic and banking problems. A link to the programme can be found here. I post this notice because I think some visitors to this site might be interested in the event, not because of any political allegiances.
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There are seasonals in the price indices, and they happen to matter when comparing January with December. Both HICP and CPI ‘should’ fall by about 0.7% in Jan. HICP sa changed little from Oct to Nov, but dipped about 0.5% in Dec. It has dipped about 0.1% further sa in Jan. CPI, mainly due to declining mortgage costs, fell almost 1% sa in both Nov and Dec, and has fallen a further 1% in Jan. The main difference between the two is owner-occupied housing costs, excluded from the HICP. It would be nuts to annualise the sa CPI fall of the last three months, would imply minus 12% or more for the year. Interest rates can decline only a little further.
The annual % change in CPI is now about zero. But the last three months sa has shown an average CPI drop of 1% per month. The (preferable, in my view) HICP seems to be dropping about 0.3% per month for the last two months, would give an annual fall about 4%. The twelve-month HICP figure (meaningless) is still showing +1.1%. I reckon, for what it is worth, that HICP could begin to drop (sa) a bit quicker than CPI over the next few months. There is more sterling pass-through on the way, but maybe not much more from ECB.
These January figures are consistent with recent forecasts of significant price declines for 2009 over 2008. Numbers like minus 3 or 4% for 2009 over 2008 are plausible, even though it is early days. There are obvious implications for indirect tax revenue, and for informally index-linked income variables.
Who would be a monetarist these days? Most monetary policy types are scrambling to re-estimate behavioural relationships.
And then there are the window-dressing operations, which are now revealed to have been exceptionally large in Ireland around the time the Government had to rescue the banks at end-September 2008.
No wonder it is hard to make sense of deposit and monetary movements at that time. In a footnote at my paper in the crisis conference I was reduced to hand-waving: “It is striking that these events have not left a very prominent track on the monetary aggregates. The evidence of a cash crunch at end-September is very muted…though of course we do not have day-by-day figures for the last week in September).”
Now we begin to know why.
Politics, Economy and Society: Irish Developmentalism, 1958-2008
12th March 2009
Research Building, University College Dublin,
All Welcome-No Fee
Session One 9am – 10am: Governance and Public Administration
Chair Dr Andreas Hess
MacCarthaigh, Muiris (IPA) and Hardiman, Niamh (UCD), Breaking with or building on the past? Reforming Irish public administration: 1958-2008
Barry, Frank (TCD), Interest-Group Politics and Irish External Trade Policy Over the Last Half-Century: A tale told without recourse to heroes
Brownlow, Graham (QUB), Fabricating Economic Development
Session Two 10.15am – 11.15am: Political Culture
Chair Dr Andreas Hess
Fanning, Bryan (UCD), From Developmental Ireland to ‘Migration Nation’
Girvin, Brian (Glasgow), Before the Celtic Tiger: Change without modernisation in Ireland 1959-1987
White, Timothy (Xavier), From preventing the future to forgetting the past: Irish political culture in the 21st century
Session Three 11.30am – 12.30pm: Political Parties
Chair Professor Michael Laffan
Murray, Thomas Patrick (UCD), Development and non-decisions: The curious case of socio-economic rights, 1958-89
Murphy, Gary (DCU), Fianna Fail, Irish sovereignty and the European question
Purseil, Niamh (UCD), Lying awake, worrying about the unemployed: politics and inertia in the 1950s
Lunch 12.30pm – 1.30pm
Session Four 1.30pm – 3pm: Economic Development
Chair Dr. Donal de Buitleir
Walsh, P.P. (UCD) and Whelan, Ciara (UCD), The Political Economy of Industrial Development in Ireland, 1958-2008
Durkan, Joseph (UCD), Preventing the future: The 1950s as the nadir of protectionism
McDowell, Moore (UCD) and Thom, Rodney (UCD), Ireland’s exchange rate policy, 1958-1998
Murray, Peter (NUIM) Educational developmentalists divided? Patrick Cannon, Patrick Hillery and the economics of education in the early 1960s
Session Five 3.15pm – 4.45pm: Politics and Society
Chair: Professor Michael Gallagher
Kissane, Bill (LSE) Comparing Ireland and Finland
Farrington, Christopher (UCD) The strange transformation of Irish nationalism in the late 20th century
Todd, Jennifer (UCD) The evolution of Irish nationalism: The northern dimension
Coakley, John (UCD), How significant is Catholic unionism in Northern Ireland?
Keynote Lecture 5pm – 6pm
Chair: Professor Louden Ryan
Professor Tom Garvin (UCD), Dublin Opinion, 1948-1962
This article in the Guardian is going to infuriate British readers — not that they have any particular right to be infuriated, while British territories continue to operate as tax havens.
None of this is sustainable in the long run, and we need to start planning for the long run now.