Results 11,381-11,400 of 14,090 for speaker:Marc MacSharry
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Not in this room.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: I thank Dr. Bacon.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: I thank Professor Ahearne for coming here. At the time economists like him would consider the output gap and whether there was one. Since then it seems they consider structural deficits. Can Professor Ahearne outline how the system has changed and how that may now show things up that they did not see at the time?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Dr. Peter Bacon said earlier this morning that the stock market could see clearly that there was a serious problem here. What is Professor Ahearne's sense of why the IMF, the ESRI, the Commission, the regulator, the Central Bank and everybody else got it so wrong? Was it because of the output gap?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Notwithstanding that, all these organisations have this expertise, they are all examining everything and with the exception of Professor Ahearne at a later stage, Morgan Kelly and David McWilliams, no one spotted what appears with the benefit of hindsight to have been the elephant in the room.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Is that sovereign borrowing?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Were the way things operated at the time adequate or inadequate in terms of economic analysis by these organisations?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: In Professor Ahearne's time with the Federal Reserve, and his examination of the 44 booms and busts that he looked into, can he outline the impact of actions by governments, political parties and oppositions in each of them? I do not want him to go through 44 of them, but can he give us a sense of the impact of their actions and the role they played?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Are there patterns of activity?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: What causes the economic activity? Was there a discourse in each of these countries that led to an economic policy that led to a particular outcome?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Were the 44 instances equally missed by the international community?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: To go back to the earlier question, in the context of the Irish situation, did the political discourse in the run-in to the crash here, in terms of government, political parties or media, contribute to our problems? Did it fuel the problem or not?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: It is not political. It is a case of the economic fact of the day and what caused the economic actions to be taken.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: The discourse was consistent with the policy of a pro-cyclical nature, rather than counter-cyclical.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: In Professor Ahearne's experience as a economist who has worked in a number of different areas, what sort of regulatory system ought to exist? He has just said that governments want to get elected. What should exist to be able to take the punch bowl out of the room? What safeguard ought to be there, or should be there, given the realities of the political discourse, as Professor Ahearne...
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Earlier this morning, Peter Bacon said that he was unclear what legal force the Central Bank can apply to determine what mortgage lending should be. Others have questioned the force of the regulator, and so on, in other testimony. What is Professor Ahearne's view of that in the period? I have just two other questions after this.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Professor Ahearne said earlier that there was an informal agreement, to quote his own words, at European level that we were not going to have a Lehman's in Europe. As an economist, can he give his view of the scale of the fiscal adjustment here if we had allowed banks to fail or if we did not pay bondholders? Would there have been an adjustment in the fiscal adjustment we had to undertake...
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: I have a final question and there are two brief parts to it. First, can Professor Ahearne clarify whether or not, in his view, the fiscal adjustment that had to be made would have been close to the same? Second, in testimony here, Governor Honohan has said that the cost of saving the banks is €40 billion. Is he right or wrong with that figure?
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: Interesting.
- Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Context Phase (4 Mar 2015)
Marc MacSharry: I would like to seek clarification on my last question. I put a question to the Governor of the Irish Central Bank, Professor Honohan, about the costs of recapitalisation. He said it would amount to some €40 billion but Professor Ahearne said it would be much less than that. How much does he think it will be? I asked earlier if the fiscal adjustment would have been less or more...