Harald Hau is an excellent German academic financial economist (living in France) – his take on last week’s deal is available here.
The NESC Secretariat have released a paper on this topic: available here.
The European Commission has released details of the PSI element of the Greek deal: you can find the note here.
My talk at the MacGill Summer School yesterday was based on this paper. Core point: I argue that last week’s European deal calls for an acceleration in the pace of Irish fiscal adjustment.
Update: The webcast for this session (also featuring David Begg, Brigid Laffan and Colm McCarthy) is available here.
Update: The Irish Times carries a shorter, edited version of my talk in this article.
The most recent Financial Stability Report from the Bank of England warns about the danger to U.K. economic stability from excessive debt forbearance by U.K. domestic banks. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, put stress on this risk in his speech introducing the report (although he also noted that this does not mean that forbearance is always a bad thing). In the report, only the potential UK fallout from the Euro crisis ranks more highly than excessive debt forbearance on the list of risks to the UK banking system. This should ring alarm bells in Ireland, since the level of debt forbearance in Ireland at present is much higher than in the U.K. Encouraging debt forbearance is a deliberate Irish government policy, and the extreme level of forbearance by domestic Irish institutions is storing up potential problems for the future.
There is a considerable overhang of unwanted or distressed (in some cases unfinished) property assets in Ireland (see Ronan Lyons and Namawinelake for discussion). The smart-money players (foreign-owned banks with Irish property assets) might front-run the slower-footed players (domestic, taxpayer-owned banks and Nama) by selling relatively quickly, leaving the Irish taxpayer to fund any eventual shortfall. (I am including the IBRC, the vestiges of Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide, in my definition of domestic banks.) So loan forbearance and front-running in Irish property markets could interact to the detriment of taxpayers.