The CEPR has produced a study of the potential gains from a bilateral deal – it is here.
Today the Irish government and Central Bank together announced a new set of plans to tackle the mortgage arrears crisis. The new plan reverses two policy decisions from the recent past that are now acknowledged to be flawed: the 2009 Land Conveyancing Act, and the Financial Regulator’s 2011 Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears. The plan also imposes ambitious targets on all Irish domestic banks, first, to offer each mortgage holder in arrears a specific proposal for resolving their arrears problem, and second (during 2014) to ensure that a majority of these individual plans are implemented or suitably modified.
The targets seem fairly aggressive, with over 55,000 individual arrears resolution plans to be offered by December of this year. It is not clear when the new process can begin since the legislative changes to the 2009 Land Conveyancing Act may not be ready for several months (today they were promised to be completed by the summer recess of the Dail).
Key documents:
Irish Central Bank press announcement:
Mortgage arrears resolution targets:
Consultation on changes to the Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears:
In this short brief, the European Commission explains its approach to fiscal adjustment – here.
The IMF has a useful new paper on the possibility of self-defeating austerity. Paul Krugman responds here. The paper shows that fiscal adjustments will bring the debt to GDP ratio down over time relative to a no-adjustment baseline, although the ratio will rise in the short run when the multiplier is greater than one. For the Irish case, this phenomenon was pointed out in the April 2012 Fiscal Assessment Report from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (see Box C, p. 45). See also posts here and here. The IMF paper also has an interesting suggestion for setting and monitoring debt targets in cyclically adjusted terms.