UCC’s Robbie Butler talks to Frank Conway for the Economic Rockstar Podcast, hopefully embedded below.
The 2015 Annual Report of the CBoI is available here.
There is lots in the report but one point that should be noted is that the €1.8 billion transfer from the Central Bank’s surplus to the Exchequer comes mainly from transactions with the Exchequer itself (interest income) and the NTMA (capital gains on bond sales) so is circular in nature.
The Department of Finance has released a Spring-less Statement (.pdf), showing some interesting debt dynamics projections and a really nice risk-assessment section (see page 26) and their likely impacts on the Irish economy. Brexit figures highly, as one might imagine, but so do other external demand shocks and domestic issues, and the fiscal risks associated with not meeting our climate change targets. The Department writes:
There are fiscal risks associated with a legally binding EU Effort Sharing Decision on climate change covering the 2013-2020 period. Ireland is obliged to achieve a 20 per cent Greenhouse Gas emissions reduction (compared to 2005 levels) in certain sectors. Current EPA projections estimate that Ireland will not achieve this reduction and failure to comply may incur costs of hundreds of millions through the purchase of carbon credits until such time as the target is complied with. Similarly, further new costs may arise in the context of a new EU climate and energy framework for the period 2020-2030, which will set new emissions reduction targets.
Scary stuff.
The Queen’s Management School, at Queen’s University Belfast, is hiring a Lecturer in Economics. The School is particularly keen to attract those with expertise in macroeconomics; public economics; health, education and welfare economics; and labour economics. More details here. The closing date is next Monday, 25 April 2016.
Jordà, Schularick and Taylor have produced a must-read paper, summarising the results of a decade-long research effort to create a long-run macro-financial data set for 17 countries. The paper is here (.pdf) and they provide some new stylized facts they document should “prove fertile ground for the development of a newer generation of macroeconomic models with a prominent role for financial factors”.
In particular, they document a ‘hockey-stick’ effect of private sector creditto GDP for a range of economies, and one of the hockey sticks can be seen in the figure below. After about 1950, for most of the elements the authors study, finance and leverage takes a more and more central role in the development of modern economies.