Karl Whelan

Lorcan Sirr: The five things Ireland must do to help fix housing Introduce a residency requirement, change the legal definition of ‘rent’ and start counting bed spaces

5 radical things to do about housing, none of which would get a single house built. Comical.

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Now it's being framed as "saving jobs". The country is at full employment. Letting restaurants earn bigger profits won't create a single new job - if they more hire people, they will just take them from elsewhere. And the measure is hugely expensive. An awful policy. And I suspect Paschal knows it.

Paschal Donohoe confirms no personal tax changes to be made in budget Minister for Finance says focus will be on tax measures that keep jobs in the country and enhance Ireland’s competitiveness

Ireland's VAT cut for hospitality business is a great example of how politics and lobbying triumphs over economics. Never something anyone considered before Covid, but once they saw it could be done, the restaurant sector fought like hell to get it brought back.

www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Routine for every class now:
- sign out previous person who used the system
- sign in to AV system computer
- verify sign-in with authenticator on phone
- wait for phone face ID to recognize
- wait for AV system computer to load
- kill Microsoft Teams auto-launch
- sign in to course system web page

"The appointment is expected to be well received internally at the IMF"

Funny.

I bet the Bank is super careful about its budget for tea and biscuits because "public money dear boy ..." but somehow they think it's fine to implement their main policy in a way that is unnecessarily expensive for the taxpayer.

The real policy issue here is left to the final sentence. There is no monetary policy rationale to pay interest on all reserves to banks. Tiering works perfectly well. Whatever the rationale for their current approach is, it's not about the need to set short-term market rates appropriately.

Yep. I'm well aware he was a terrible guy. Deleted the post to stop this kind of nonsense being in my messages.

One person's logical fallacies and invalid arguments are another person's "common sense". I didn't like the guy at all. I just thought the reaction to Ezra's piece wasn't fully justified.

Yep. I wasn't a fan.

These ideas go way beyond one guy and those young minds are exposed to them everywhere. Ezra's point - "Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness" - is these ideas need to be challanged with the same energy with which they are being promoted.

I will also point out that I don’t post much here but I made the Hitler analogy in response to an article by Simon Jenkins praising Trump. But because it was Trump not guys like Kirk.

Ok, but I didn't make the argument about Hitler, did I? Sorry I replied tbh. Too old for this shit.

He said lots of stuff that was obviously wrong but people who live in a bubble of self-feeding disinformation usually really belive the nonsense they spout is correct. I suspect he rarely believed he was outright lying. And while he added to the division, he was more a symptom than a cause.

Congratulations on the Godwin's law in one step contribution. This guy literally was not Hitler.

I gave up after writing this and then seeing the exact same discussion a year later. I'm out of the UK fiscal commentary business.

karlwhelan.com/blog/?p=2132

When it’s annual black hole season, you’ve gotta do the black hole thing. It’s a modern British cultural tradition.

Dundrum Town Centre owners appeal council refusal for outdoor food concessions Local residents cited concerns around fire safety as well as ‘serious health, hygiene, and safety risks'

So guys selling donuts & hotdogs outside a shopping centre is "prohibiting the making of a space dedicated to pedestrians and the general public” and stops it acting "as a distinct focal point" Planning-person brain on steroids. No wonder nothing ever gets done

www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

1/Kevin Hassett had long ago discredited himself as a scholar by parroting claims about the economy he knew to be false. Even so, parroting the lie about rigged statistics, is a new low. The academy should ostracize him the same way a fabricator of research should be ostracized.

Jenkins’s relentless commitment to being the worst Guardian columnist of all time gets taken to new levels. Airs of “Sure Adolf might be a bit of a rum bloke but look at the lovely architecture…”

And yet this is somehow actually worse. Would it have killed someone from UCD HR to sit in front of a camera for 3 minutes and read a script?

Ah, look, my university has decided to get a scary AI robot to tell me that doing research, admin and teaching preparation from home (which I've done forever) is apparently a "hybrid" arrangement that I need to fill out a form to get approval for.

www.ucd.ie/hr/a-z/hybri...

Two bottom lines.

- Don't accept offers on prediction markets. If you want to have any chance of making money, you have to make the offers.

- Don't buy low-priced contracts. And there is some evidence you can make money offering them.

Lately, I've been working on betting and prediction markets. Here's a working paper on this topic written with two UCD colleagues -- it is (AFAIK) the only systematic analysis of the prices on the Kalshi prediction market. We're still in pre-submission mode so comments\critiques welcome.

Uncontested: Dazn’s $1bn story reveals why the Club World Cup is really here Saudi-backed streaming superpower’s broadcasting deal for Fifa’s global project is the next expansionist step towards a world super league

Basically, yes. The money came from DAZN who seem to have got the money from Saudi.

www.theguardian.com/football/202...

And it worked fine to control rates. It would work fine now also.

Commercial banks, of course, like earning big profits on the large amount of reserves still in existence. So the lobbying here is asymmetric. Banks like tiering when the rate is negative but denounce it when the rate is positive.

3. If these hawkish guys cared so much about Eurosystem profits, they'd ask why they are paying interest on every single euros of reserves, rather than exempting a tier of them and paying on the marginal reserves. They did tiering when the rate was negative to protect commercial bank profits.

2. Making profits isn't anywhere in the Eurosystem's list of things it should be doing according to the Treaty. If bond purchases are a tool to bring inflation towards its target, then they should be an option.

3 points on this.

1. Eurosystem made profits due to bond buying for years because there was generally a positive spread between the bond yields and the rate it paid on reserves (which was negative for years). You can't look at losses without factoring in profits.

www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Crystal Palace: John Textor to sell stake to New York Jets owner Woody Johnson Crystal Palace part-owner John Textor signs an agreement to sell Woody Johnson his stake in the club, believed to be worth close to £190m.

Exciting for Crystal Palace. I hear this guy is a great owner!

www.bbc.com/sport/footba...