As promised a few weeks ago, here is a link to the video of EUI’s workshop “Life in the Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default?” held a few weeks ago. All of the presentations were interesting but I’d particularly recommend Martin Hellwig’s presentation in part 2 and sovereign debt lawyers Mitu Gulati and Lee Buchheit’s presentations in part 3. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be video of Charles Calomiris’s thought-provoking presentation but his slides (and the other presentations) can be found by clicking on the links here.
Niall O’Hanlon (Central Statistics Office) will present a paper on this topic at the next SSISI meeting on Thursday, 19th May 2011, starting at 6:15 pm, in the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2. Non-members are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion. The discussants will be David Duffy of ESRI and Marian Finnegan of Sherry FitzGerald.
Abstract:
The Central Statistics Office will publish the first results of its national House Price Index on May 13th 2011. This hedonic index is constructed using data on mortgage drawdowns by eight lending institutions under Section 13 of the Housing Act (2002).This paper describes how the development of the index has been largely driven by an impending European legislative requirement to produce indices of the costs of Owner Occupied Housing in the context of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices. It discusses the limitations of data on Irish residential property transactions in the context of the national House Price Index and the proposed register of property transactions. Practical considerations covering the treatment of data, the design of the hedonic functions, the rolling year regression model employed and the weighting of sub indices to form a composite national index are described.
The index results are examined in the context of some of the other measures of house prices in Ireland. Finally, the paper explores some future challenges for further development of the measurement of residential property prices in Ireland.
Martin Wolf writes on this topic in this article.
As stories about a Greek sovereign debt restructuring gather pace, expect to read lots more stories like this one in which some guy claims that a Greek restructuring would “severely damage the banking systems of Ireland and Portugal.”
Let’s be clear. It won’t. We’ve been here before with people quoting figures from the BIS on Irish exposure to Greek debt that stemmed from holdings of foreign-owned banks in the IFSC. However, even the BIS figures now show “Irish” bank exposure to Greek debt has collapsed to below $1 billion (you can find a time series in here if you look hard enough.) God knows there’s enough to worry about in relation to the Irish economy and its banks, so let’s at least try to put this one to rest.