Economic Incentives

The Irish economy is no stranger to crisis.  Since the 1950s, the most severe of these have occurred in roughly 25-year intervals.  The curr...

Charts like the following appear fairly regularly. The latest occurrence was on the website of The Wall Street Journal.  There is nothi...

The NTMA are going to very busy organising bond sales for the coming decades.  Here is a chart from the latest IMF review showing the impact...

In the discussion around the Promissory Note/Long-Term Government Bond swap it quickly became clear that the benefits of the new arrangemen...

Patrick Honohan’s recent appearance at the Oireachtas Finance Committee included the following exchange. Deputy Kevin Humphreys:   “Th...

As explained in the previous post it is not the size of the government debt that has a direct impact on the public finances; it is the inte...

Lots of talk about a “legacy of debt” in response to yesterday’s re-arranging of the Promissory Notes/ELA framework.  First up, governments ...

A recent post over on Notesonthefront has attracted a lot of attention on “the cost of the banking crisis”.  The figures from Eurostat sho...

The CSO have released the December 2012 Retail Sales Index .  There is something missing from the data – the much heralded “surge” in retail...

A new dataset from Eurostat has received a lot of attention recently as it highlights the deficit costs of the bailout of our banking syste...

Today’s sale of a €1 billion contingent convertible capital note (a form of subordinated bond) in Bank of Ireland brings the assets the Stat...

The Central Bank have released their Quarterly Financial Accounts for Q1 2012 (release here ; data here ). This is the financial position of...

Today’s National Accounts release from the CSO has generated a lot of reaction.  One peripheral issue is the impact of the figures on the g...

At the end of 2007, the gross general government debt was €47.2 billion.  The recent Eurostat debt and deficit release showed that this has...