What is the problem that selling Aer Lingus is supposed to solve?

I am writing this in the Aer Lingus lounge in Heathrow’s new Terminal 2, somewhere I spend a lot of time. Like a lot of other Irish people, I am a loyal customer of the national carrier, for a very simple reason: it’s a fantastic airline. It serves lots and lots of destinations direct from Dublin — no more going through London to get anywhere, which was once very often the case. It’s cheap — thanks to competition with Ryanair, British Airways and others. It offers the things that frequent fliers want — lounge access and terrific service. It pays decent wages. It’s Irish.

What’s not to like?

When deciding whether or not to sell the State’s remaining stake in Aer Lingus, you have to make value judgements, whether you admit to doing so or not: there are no “scientific” grounds to prefer one outcome to another. It’s the customer experience that matters to me, and I don’t see why you would think that selling the State’s stake would improve that in the long run.

So, what’s in it for me consumers?

Here’s a radical thought: ballot Aer Lingus customers, and see what they think. Isn’t the customer supposed to be king?

Video, Audio and Slides from the Irish Economy Conference

Are here. Many thanks to everyone who attended, and particularly our guest speakers.

ECB Analysis of Virtual Currency Schemes

New report here.

Upcoming Conference on Macroprudential Regulation

Call for Papers: Macroprudential regulation: policy dynamics and limitations

A joint academic-practitioner conference with the theme Macroprudential regulation: policy dynamics and limitations will be held in Dublin, Ireland on Friday September 4th, 2015, organized by the Financial Mathematics and Computation Cluster (FMC2), the Department of Economics, Finance & Accounting at Maynooth University and the UCD School of Business at University College Dublin.

Macroprudential regulation is fairly new, and there are many unanswered questions. Can macroprudential constraints on credit be reliably attuned with the business cycle and/or credit cycle? Are fixed constraints on credit safer and more reliable than attempts at dynamic anti-cyclical ones? Should regulators take account of market or regulatory imperfections, such as in the construction sector, in setting constraints on credit growth? Is macroprudential control by an independent central bank consistent with the democratic accountability of government economic and social policies? Potential topics include:
* Business cycles, financial cycles, and the feasibility of dynamic macroprudential control
* The desirability and effectiveness of LTI and LTV limits on mortgage lending
* Democratic accountability and central bank independence
* Modelling house price movements and household debt and their interactions
* Controlling credit growth and credit flows in the Eurozone
* International case studies of macroprudential regulation.
* Assessment of macroprudential credit-restricting policies

Please send papers or detailed proposals by June 15th, 2015 at the latest to Irene.moore@ucd.ie; all papers must be submitted electronically in adobe pdf format. There will be both main conference sessions and poster sessions. We will consider proposed contributions to the poster session until 31st July. The academic coordinators for the conference are Gregory Connor and John Cotter, who can be contacted at Gregory.connor@nuim.ie or John.cotter@ucd.ie.

There are no submission fees or attendance fees for the conference. We are grateful to the Science Foundation of Ireland and the Irish Institute of Bankers for their generous support of this conference. The Financial Mathematics Computation Cluster (FMC2) is a collaboration between University College Dublin, Maynooth University, Dublin City University and industry partners, with support from the Science Foundation of Ireland.

Ultra posse nemo obligatur, anyone?

Paul Mason has a blog post and interview here, worth reading and watching. I am going to stick my neck out and assert that Manolis Glezos does in fact speak with a certain moral authority. But it is the German deputy finance minister’s constant insistence on obeying the law that prompts this post, along with its title. For German government use of the principle in the economic domain, see here (p. 188).