Brian Lucey provides a critique of the various banking plans here.
.
Courtesy of Mark Thoma, here is a nice graph with house price-rent ratios for five countries, including Ireland.
At a time when the country is trying to regain competitiveness, it is worth pointing to areas where we are extremely competitive. €150 will get you in to the rest of the season’s home league games at Shamrock Rovers, and you can add kids to the half season ticket at €25 a pop. How much change would you have out of €150 after a Ryanair flight to Old Trafford, a match ticket there, and a couple of prawn sandwiches?
Other League of Ireland clubs also offer good value. So get out and support your local club!
Simon Johnson is having fun with the sayings of Peer Steinbrück over at the Baseline Scenario, but the German Finance Minister is facing stiff competition from Franz Muentefering, who apparently showed up at an unemployment rally simultaneously saying that “We must do all we can at the moment to protect jobs” and that “There will be no third stimulus package”. Talk about chutzpah.
Speaking of stimulus packages, the latest IMF Regional Economic Outlook for Europe makes some interesting points about the size of fiscal multipliers at times like this:
As Patrick Honohan has noted often in his recent contributions, despite the confusion prevailing in Ireland today about our banking problems, there is wide agreement among banking experts about what constitutes best practice when dealing with banks that are either insolvent or failing to comply with capital adequacy regulations. Regulators seize the bank, place it into administration and the bank’s assets are used to pay off depositors first with bondholders getting paid off if there is anything left.
In our current circumstances, the almost-blanket guarantee on liabilities agreed on September 30 prevents such a solution from being imposed now on the covered Irish banks. I interpret Fine Gael’s new plan as an attempt to achieve an FDIC-style resolution while sticking within the restrictions imposed by the guarantee.