Reminder – Euro Crisis Roundtable, 4pm, Thursday

Euro Crisis Roundtable

Chair: Kevin O’Rourke, Chichele Professor of Economic History, University of Oxford

Speakers: Richard Portes, Hans-Werner Sinn, Alan Taylor

Date: Thursday, 18th April
Time: 4pm
Venue: The J M Synge Theatre, Room 2039, Ground Floor Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin

This is a jointly organised lecture by the IIIS and the Trinity Long Room Hub. This lecture series is an associated event of the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU. The series will run from January to June. Admission is free and all are welcome.

A discussion of the future of the euro area with leading experts.  Hans-Werner Sinn is President of the CES-ifo Institute and one of Germany’s most prominent economists. Richard Portes is Professor at London Business School and President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.  Alan Taylor is Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia and an expert in financial economics and economic history.

Economic Policy Panel

The Economic Policy Panel will be held in Dublin later this week – the papers are here.

Rethinking Macro Policy II: Getting Granular

The IMF has released a new paper here, in tandem with its major macro conference today and tomorrow.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Rarely have statistics been misused so much for political purposes as when recently the ECB published the results of a survey of household wealth in the Eurozone countries.

Thus begins a new column by Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji, which points out, inter alia, that the median household wealth statistics currently being used by some German economists and commentators to justify future wealth grabs in the Eurozone periphery are in fact telling us something important about German inequality.

But it gets worse. Tim Worstall (H/T Eurointelligence) quotes the ECB report as follows:

2.2.3 VOLUNTARY PRIVATE PENSIONS/WHOLE LIFE INSURANCE
This section shows how households save for retirement using voluntary private pension
plans and/or whole life insurance contracts. Public pensions and occupational pension plans
are not considered in this report, as the value of some public pensions and occupational pension plans can be difficult for households to evaluate. Cross-country comparisons are challenging in the sense that institutional arrangements across countries with respect to the different modes of retirement savings, such as voluntary private versus public or occupational, can be quite substantial. A deeper analysis of these differences falls outside the scope of this report.

As Worstall says, this means that many households’ major asset is being excluded, essentially on the grounds that including them would be really rather difficult.

Time for the report to be consigned to the dustbin, surely, and for those people currently abusing it to spend even five minutes or so reflecting on what the likely political impact would be if their proposals were implemented.

Mario Draghi: The role of monetary policy in addressing the crisis in the euro area

This speech by Mario Draghi is generating some interest in comments.   It usefully puts the ECB’s approach to monetary policy during the crisis in a comparative perspective. 

Some complementary reading: Paul Krugman on euro area macro policy; Simon Wren-Lewis and Antonio Fatas on the dual mandate; Janet Yellen on communication/expectations management at the Fed; and Gavyn Davies on inflation targeting.   On the subject of inflation targeting, this new Vox ebook contains a number of interesting perspectives, including chapters by Stefan Gerlach and Karl Whelan (pdf here).