Tag: iiea

I’d like to flag an excellent new initiative that our readers are likely to find useful. As many of you know, the Institute for International and European Affairs has played a very important role in recent years in promoting debate on European issues. The Institute has now started a blog focusing on European topics which already has a lot of interesting material. I have agreed to contribute some longer pieces there.  They’ve promised to make me some pretty graphs if I ask nicely which might make a nice change sometimes from the no-frills approach we adopt here at the IE blog!

Which brings me back to an issue related to my proposals for a debt-to-equity swap for central bank loans. Some commenters have rightly pointed out that this proposal seems to give up on burden sharing with bondholders. That it does so is just a reflection of the current EU position on this issue. However, this strengthens the case for the EU becoming involved in owning the Irish bank sector: If they want the bondholders paid back so badly, then one can argue that they should contribute some of their own funds to the effort.

But coming back to the European debate on bank debt, I think the EU officials are adopting the wrong approach to dealing with this issue. I also think that the proposals adopted by the European Commission to allow haircuts on bonds that are issued in the future, say after 2013, is unworkable. For a discussion of this and an alternative approach, see this post at the IIEA site.