In today’s Sindo Colm puts the context around Willem Buiter’s comments earlier this week that Ireland might need a second bailout and should negotiate one in good time.
From Colm’s piece:
Economists who work for banks have acquired a bit of an image problem, well-deserved in many cases. Buiter is not one of these. Before joining Citicorp last year, Willem Buiter held economics professorships at Yale, Cambridge and the London School of Economics, three of the top economics departments in the world, and served a term on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. Along the way, he has built a reputation as a thoroughly competent analyst of the international monetary system, one of the best around. He did not come over to Dublin to shred his reputation with some off-the-wall comment about Ireland. With all due respect to Mr Noonan, Buiter’s comments are not “ludicrous”. They are consistent with the behaviour of interest rates on Irish bonds in the secondary market and with the arithmetic of debt sustainability.
It is difficult for politicians to stick with an unavoidable fiscal adjustment programme in the secure knowledge that it may not be enough to deliver its declared objective — an end to reliance on official lenders. That, unfortunately, is the position in which the Irish Government has been placed. The budget deficit needs to be eliminated, in any plausible scenario, and as quickly as possible. The small print in the Memorandum of Understanding with the EU and the IMF says that the temporary period of emergency lending will be over at the end of 2013 provided only that the budget tightening stays on track. Ireland will, according to the programme, be able to finance itself in the markets by 2014, without any support from official lenders. You either believe this or you do not. Most Irish economists do not, so Willem Buiter is not saying anything you have not heard before. The Government may well privately agree with this assessment, and their efforts to secure burden-sharing on the massive bank rescue costs suggest that they do. But they can hardly be expected to persist with tax increases and cutbacks while openly admitting that the planned deficit reduction will not be enough.
This is where Kevin O’Rourke’s work on the political trilemma is so useful. We have to consider the economic situation (and sets of constraints) at the same time as the political situation, with its attendant sets of constraints.
This is worth a thread on Irisheconomy: do commenters feel that a second bailout may be required? If so for how long? What conditions would you think might be attached to such a bailout? One really useful reading to think about this is the Fiscal Council report, pages 22-24 especially.