Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Economics 28/04/2010: Our week so far

So will Germany open a 'needle exchange' for Europe's debt junkies (para-phrasing Laughinbear comment)? Check CNBC's rankings of debt by nation (here - all rankings slide show)... Greece is No 16, Ireland is No1! Link here.

Ireland 10-year yields are at 5.6% and moving in tandem with Portugal and Greece. Here is a revealing weekly step-function for our 10-year notes (hat tip to Brian Lucey):

6 comments:

  1. laughingbearApril 28, 2010

    Merkel/Schaueble, DSK and Trichet held emergency phone conference this morning. Question is: Will the debt Junkies continue to share their needles? The debt spiral/contagion is in full motion !

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  2. is there anyone out there listening?- i don't mean hearing - LISTENING

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  3. @Anonymous - Listening? Where? Leinster House? I think they are all out for PINTS! We are still talking about 'reversing the cuts' and 'doing the right thing by the markets'. What is now clear is that the markets do not expect our Government to throw its taxpayers overboard to save the elusive bondholders. Neither do the markets expect the Government to destroy future growth potential of this economy to protect public sector interests. Nor do the markets expect the zombie banks to be sustained on a life-support system... What the markets do expect is a drastic action to correct for absurdly excessive levels of debt carried by the real economy in Ireland. In other words, the markets expect us to renegotiate our debt!

    Is anyone listening? Well, seems like the answer is No, despite us paying their (and their advisers') lavish salaries. Do they care? No, because we have shown no willingness to call them to account.

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  4. I wholeheartedly agree with all the above but more woryingly on a global level with the prospect of such huge bail outs both corporate and sovereign (TARP, IMF, ECB, etc) becoming the norm what is the probability of a bond market collapse and interest rate spike.

    we seem to be deaf to the word DEBT!!!!

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  5. You are absolutely right - not only we are deaf, we are actually getting bullied by the Irish officials into trying to evade the issue of the effects of IFSC debt on Ireland's fundamentals. Last year, myself and Brian Lucey wrote about the issue of our total debt mountain. We received angry 'requests' from two official bodies of the State asking us to retract the numbers and to explicitly separate IFSC from the total debt volumes. I did it in my column in Business & Finance, while stating that not all of the IFSC debt is divorced from the Irish economy.

    The insanity can be defined as doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. We got into this mess because we piled too much debt onto private sector (allowing public sector to escape from borrowing - you can treat stamps and CGT revenue and parts of VAT revenue as direct corollaries of the debt assumed in the private sector). We are now assuming even more debt to get ourselves out of the problem.

    Globally, the same story replays again. Debt is being shifted from net exporting nations to net importing nations. Which subsequently roll the same debt over to net exporters as an asset. How long can this last?

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  6. "we seem to be deaf to the word DEBT!!!!"

    Brian Lenihan's understanding of debt is "long term economic value" and he refers to liabilities as "assests'
    hence the National ASSET Management Agency.

    He refers to the losses predicted by Constantin
    as "profits"

    He refers to an upward sloping interest rate curve as
    a constant downward rate curve.

    The list goes on and on and as the the song says
    "dont stop believing, hold on to that feeling,
    this nightmare never ends"

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