Patrick Honohan

Central banking manual for fighting crises: the need for split personalities - OMFIF Patrick Honohan, governor of the Central Bank of Ireland from 2009 to 2015 – the seminal period of euro area sovereign debt upsets – is a central banker who almost literally grew up with economic and ...

Nice review from @omfif.bsky.social of my @piie.com book on crisis management. www.omfif.org/2025/08/cent...

Mackerel sky, Dublin tonight.

How much capital do central banks really have? My new
@piie.com paper provides the calculation for twenty countries. There are some surprises.

On the other hand, mysterious non-standard notional assets appear in the accounts of others, obscuring their true negative marked-to-market condition. My @PIIE blog post highlights this for four leading central banks. (A working paper covering another twenty is coming soon).

Some European central banks report negative net worth even though their gold holdings, when valued at market price, make their marked-to-market capital quite high.

How much money have central banks really lost? Central banks experienced widespread financial losses over the last three years. The problem has been most severe at banks whose balance sheets were bloated in the years of low interest rates and quan...

Central bank accounting is not standardised, making their financial condition hard to compare. www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

Thanks so much to Philip Lane, Agustin Benetrix @tcdeconomics.bsky.social, Alan Barrett @esri.ie ie and all the distinguished participants for my birthday conference @ria.ie and this absorbing special issue of my favourite journal.

Studying the macroeconomic policy questions of Ireland over the past fifty years (with many colleagues) has been fascinating. The black hole of MNC profit repatriation, stabilizing the fiscal accounts, migration and unemployment, wealth inequality and financial crisis: there’s no better laboratory.

Essentially all of this deficit comes from pharmaceuticals. An additional sectoral tariff on pharmaceuticals is the shoe that has not yet dropped. It will.

The 42% comes from dividing the US merchandise trade deficit with Ireland (US$86.7 billion according the US data), by Ireland's exports to the US ($103.3 billion). Half of this is 42%.

Given the (strange) way yesterday's new US tariffs were calculated, Ireland escapes a much higher tariff (42%) by being included in the EU (20%).

Interesting combination and seasonal timing for this podcast from @bruegel.bsky.social

You rarely see any 1c (or 2c) coins in Ireland since we introduced a rounding system in October 2015.
It works like this:
Rounding is voluntary and applies only to cash payments;
Your bill is rounded up or down to the nearest 5c;
1c and 2c coins are still legal tender.
Everyone is happy.

Patrick Honohan: Ireland is more exposed to Trump’s tariff war than any other European country Without turning away from the United States, it is vital for Ireland to remain unambiguously and progressively engaged in collective action in support of Europe

Ireland collects much of the corporate tax revenue a more coherent US tax code would channel back across the Atlantic. Ireland could also be in the firing line as a major & growing contributor to the US trade deficit—now 4th in the world. By @phonohan.bsky.social: www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Through Waterford-born Nobel prize-winning Physicist Ernest Walton (1903-95), Ireland has a better claim than the United States to having been the first (along with New Zealander Ernest Rutherford and Englishman John Cockroft), to have "split the atom". www.atomicarchive.com/history/manh...

Disappointing indeed. International regulatory collaboration is needed to help prevent climate damage from the financial sector.

Tariffs, tensions and tackling inflation: the road ahead What impact do global events have on our economy? And how has the ECB’s monetary policy shifted? As 2024 comes to an end, our host Paul Gordon discusses these questions and more with Chief Economist

Here is ECB Chief Economist Philip Lane recommending my new @piie.com book The Central Bank as Crisis Manager in today’s ECB Podcast (Minute 15:30). soundcloud.com/europeancent...

Good idea. I’ll do the same. 50 years for me since I finished the same LSE MSc, in the days of Gorman, Sargan, Durbin, Morishima and some youngsters who are now giants (Sen, Dasgupta, Hendry…)

Online at 6 pm Wednesday (Dublin time)

And the patterns are fairly persistent:

(The other outliers are AC=Accommodation and food services, TR=Transportation; ED=Education. Full names in the cso.ie website from which the chart has been calculated.)

And one sector provides an interesting exception to the lackluster 2019-2024 sectoral real earnings growth in Ireland. It's the Information and Communication sector (shown below as IT), already with relatively high weekly earnings and still racing ahead as it has for many years.

If it's economics that drives voting in general elections, the question for Ireland today is whether it's microeconomics or macro. (See the NYT piece by @fotoole). These graphs quantify the contrast between rocketing aggregate employment growth and below peak average real earnings.

I think it’s spelled “Winsorizing”. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsori...

I like to think that these restrictions will represent only the first phase of the euro CBDC’s operation. When it’s up and running successfully, they can be removed.

Good points made by @luigaricano.

In addition, these restrictions that the ECB is proposing for its CBDC (maximum balance, interest rate) will prevent it anchoring a payments system independent of US jurisdiction…

How did Ireland recover so strongly from the global financial crisis? - Economics Observatory The global financial crisis of 2007-09 had a huge impact on Ireland, with soaring unemployment and a big rise in public debt as the government bailed out the country’s banks. But the Irish economy has...

The global financial crisis had a huge impact on Ireland, with soaring unemployment & a big rise in public debt with the bank bailouts; but the economy has bounced back strongly since 2012, mainly due to globalisation & FDI

@econ-observatory.bsky.social

www.economicsobservatory.com/how-did-irel...

Economists working on Ireland. Great idea Rebecca, thanks!

What a change globalization brought for Ireland. This annual data going back eighty years shows how, when fiscal policy was brought under control and globalization got under way in the early 1990s, the dynamics of the Irish economy changed utterly.

Take a look at the jump in Irish employment. 100,000 in the past twelve months alone. Will the approaching de-globalization clouds be the peak of this roller-coaster?