Panel Discussion from the Milken Institute Global Conference: The Eurozone: Still One for All and All for One? Speakers: Bo Lundgren , Director General, Swedish National Debt Office; former Minister for Fiscal and Financial Affairs James McCaughan , CEO, Principal Global Investors Nouriel Roubini , Professor of Economics and International Business, Stern School of Business, New York University, Chairmen of RGE Moderator: Komal Sri-Kumar , Group Managing Director and Chief Global Strategist, TCW Group Inc.; Senior Fellow, Milken Institute Click for Video [75:27, Roubini Remarks start at 21:43] The debt crisis in Greece has seriously frayed the ties that bind the Eurozone together with a monetary union but without fiscal transfers. Unable to afford the expensive social programs its citizens demand while staying within the Eurozone’s debt limits, Greece can neither raise import tariffs nor devalue its currency

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Roubini on Eurozone Panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference

Mark Weisbrot The Guardian Unlimited , April 28, 2010 See article on original website As I have noted previously , Latvia has experienced the worst two-year economic downturn on record , losing more than 25 percent of GDP. It is projected to shrink further during the first half of this year, before beginning a slow recovery, in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that it will not reach even its 2006 level of output by 2015 – nine years later. With 22 percent unemployment, a sharp increase in emigration and cuts to education funding that will cause long-term damage, the social costs of this trajectory are also high

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Baltic Countries Show What Greece May Look Forward To If It Follows EC/IMF Advice

The last two years represent an extraordinary period for the U.S. auto industry. Gasoline prices rose fast during the first six months of 2008, topping out at a national average of just over $4 per gallon.

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What’s ahead for the auto industry? A conference on the longer-term perspective

The Australian notes : In an interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly, Bishop Robinson [the former auxiliary bishop of Sydney] says boys suffered more than girls at the hands of pedophile priests partly because they were more available to them, with nuns tending to play a greater role in the religious education of young girls.

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Sick Rationalization By Pedophile Priests

The PowerPoint programme revolutionised business meetings in the early 1990′s. No longer did people turn up with a few notes, and spend 15 minutes drawing out ideas on a flip chart or acetate

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US army wages war on PowerPoint

Trade protectionism is on the rise around the world, as the blog forecast in its Budget Outlook back in October. It suggested that ” arguments about the ‘export of jobs’ will increase “, and argued that ” chemical companies will need to keep a close eye on the political arena, as they operate in a complex value chain, and may not otherwise appreciate the potential impact of a development in a key supplying or consuming industry “. Now the GPCA (Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association) is holding a high-level workshop on the subject in Bahrain next month.

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Middle East worries about rise of dumping charges

IMF As Grim Reaper of Austerity ? As I wrote last June: When the International Monetary Fund or World Bank offer to lend money to a struggling third-world country (or “emerging market”), they demand ” austerity measures “. As Wikipedia describes it : In economics, austerity is when a national government reduces its spending in order to pay back creditors.

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America Is Losing Its Imperial Status, And Global Institutions Such As The IMF, G20 And BIS Are Filling The Void

In this Amazon exclusive, we brought together authors Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini and asked them to interview each other. Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs , and other publications, and his books include The End of the Free Market , The J Curve , and The Fat Tail .

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Roubini Crisis Economics Q&A with Ian Bremmer on Amazon

The government will establish the European Energy Research Centre at the Tyndall National Institute , and provide initial support of 20 million euro. See here . Tyndall has no prior experience with energy research, and I must admit that I was unaware of its existence until the 20 million euro rumour emerged a few months ago.

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20 million euro for NEW energy research centre

The Irish Times reports about Bank of Ireland’s capital raising plans here and provides links to all the relevant documentation so I don’t have to. It is, of course, good news that there’s some sign that private investors are willing to invest in one of the Irish banks.

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Bank of Ireland Capital Raising Plans

INEOS CEO Jim Ratcliffe has told the Sunday Times that the UK government ” refused financial help ” last year, when sales collapsed. He revealed that: • The company had approached the UK government for help with liquidity, including deferral of VAT (sales tax) payments, but ” got absolutely nowhere “.

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INEOS was refused help by the UK government

The political firestorm inspired by the SEC’s citing of Goldman Sachs for fraud shows no sign of dying down. It has even inspired a Broadway song that describes how another hedge fund, Magnetar, allegedly made money out of betting against the housing securities it helped to create.

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Betting against the American dream

Boeing CEO Jim McNerney succinctly summarized a recent study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies regarding unemployment rates for different income brackets: The Center analyzed the labor conditions faced by income-grouped U.S. households during the fourth quarter of 2009

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Unemployment for Those Who Earn $150,000 or More is Only 3%, While Unemployment for the Poor is 31%

I received an email recently from someone who objected to my characterisation of NAMA’s goal of being cashflow positive as something of a loaves and fishes act. The argument put to me was that while Brendan McDonagh says that only one third of NAMA’s loans are income producing and NAMA is projecting to pay a discount of 47% for these loans, the fact that the interest rate on NAMA’s income generating loans are higher than on its bonds means that it will still generate positive cash flow

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Are One Third of NAMA’s Loans Producing Cash?

James Grant, editor of the oft quoted Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, has an idea to improve the financial reform proposal being considered by Congress. “Let the senior financiers keep their salaries and bonuses, and let them do with their banks what they will. If, however, their bank fails, let the bankers themselves fail

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Financial Reform – "Put the Fear of God into Wall Street"

LyondellBasell (LBI) is to exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 30 April , 15 months after entering it in January 2009 . The past 15 months have been an expensive lesson for those debt-holders who financed Basell’s purchase of Lyondell in July 2007, at the peak of the market. LBI entered Chapter 11 with $24bn of debt.

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LyondellBasell to exit Chapter 11

The CSO released its latest survey on Earnings and Labour Costs on Thursday. The following summarizes the changes in the main aggregates between Q3 2008 and Q3 2009: Whole economy: Employment: -8.4% Average weekly earnings: -0.8% Average hourly earnings: +1.8% Private sector: Employment: -10.3% Average weekly earnings: -2.7% Average hourly earnings: +0.6% Public sector: Employment: -2.2% Average weekly earnings: +1.9% Average hourly earnings: +2.2% (The earnings figures are gross, and take no account of income taxes or levies.) Hourly earnings in the private sector peaked in Q1 2009 and declined by 4.7% over the following two quarters. In the public sector, hourly earnings continued to rise until Q2 2009 and declined by 1.1% in the following quarter

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Recent Trends in Earnings and Employment

In response to the chorus of experts calling for the mega-banks to be broken up, defenders of our current banking system argue that because Canada’s banking system is pretty stable, and Canada has some giant banks, size isn’t the issue. This might be a great argument … except that Canada’s banking system is completely different from America’s banking system.

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No, Canada’s Big Banks Don’t Justify America’s Too Big to Fails

Derivatives are the world’s largest market, dwarfing the size of the bond market and world’s real economy. The derivatives market is currently at around $600 trillion or so (in gross notional value). In contrast, the size of the worldwide bond market (total debt outstanding) as of 2009 was an estimated $82.2 trillion

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Are Interest Rate Derivatives a Ticking Time Bomb?

USA Today points out : Banks that received federal assistance during the financial crisis reduced lending more aggressively and gave bigger pay raises to employees than institutions that didn’t get aid, a USA TODAY/American University review found. *** • Lending fell

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Mega-Banks Which Received Bailouts Slashed Lending More, Gave Higher Bonuses, and Reduced Costs Less Than Banks Which Didn’t Get Bailed Out

University of Texas economics professor James K. Galbraith previously said that fraud caused the financial crisis: You had fraud in the origination of the mortgages, fraud in the underwriting, fraud in the ratings agencies. Senator Kaufman said last month: Fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis

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Economist James Galbraith: Economists Should Move into the Background, and "Criminologists to the Forefront"

We are often told that investment bankers are much cleverer than the rest of us. But sometimes, they do seem to lack common sense. Their behaviour since the Crisis, in paying out $bns in bonuses to the lucky few, seems no way to appease understandable public anger over the cost of the banks’ bailout

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IMF targets bankers’ FAT

The Department of Finance explains the data revision here .  In terms of the GGB in 2010 and subsequent years, there is an interesting set of communication issues.  As per the DF note,  one approach is to make a sharp distinction between the ‘headline’ and ‘underlying’ GGB with the difference consisting of the ‘unrequited’ capital transfers into Anglo-Irish etc. (as opposed to the equity-type investments in AIB and Bank of Ireland).  This distinction may be effective if the bank-related capital transfers are a ‘once off’ event or a “twice off” event (ie 2009 and 2010) but may lose its force in relation to a steady sequence of capital transfers over the next decade.  To the extent that the promissory notes spread out the capital transfers over a long period,  this may be a downside to this approach relative to making a larger-but-final capital transfer in 2010

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More on the Revised GGB

Eurostat has today announced that the Irish general government deficit for 2009 was in fact 14.3% rather than the 11.7% figure that the government has been reporting. Reuters report Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said this was a result of a technical reclassification associated with government support provided to the banking sector. “It is important to note that the underlying 2009 general government deficit for Ireland is 11.8 percent of GDP, which is broadly similar to that projected in December’s budget,” he said

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Eurostat Revises Irish Deficit to 14.3%

While Paul Krugman has seemed to go against the rising tide of experts calling for the giant banks to be broken up, he clarified his position last week: My view is that I’d love to see those financial giants broken up, if only for political reasons: it’s bad to have banks so big they can often write laws. Bingo! The giant banks have enough money to – literally – purchase the politicians

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Krugman: Break Up the Giant Banks to Stop Their Domination of the Political Process