Monday 30 March 2009

Ireland's credit rating downgraded; worse to come

Ireland has just been downgraded. It lost its coveted AAA credit rating. Standard & Poor’s weren't comfortable with the country's rapidly deteriorating public finances.

As soon as I heard, I quickly logged onto the Irish Department of Finance website, eager to find some lurid fiscal numbers as a basis for a new post.

Alas, the website is a total mess. The only thing I could find out for sure was that in 2008, the deficit was over 6 percent of GDP. As for recent performance, the Irish are keeping it quiet. As far as I can tell, they don't publish monthly tax or expenditure data.

Undeterred, I logged onto the Irish Central Statistical Office website. There I found some data that pointed to the source of Ireland's difficulties; the housing market, or to be more precise, housing construction.

The Irish bubble was totally different from the one in the UK. Whereas UK planning laws restricted housing construction, Irish planning laws encouraged new building. Over the last 15 or so years, Ireland embarked on a frantic construction frenzy. Between 1991 and 2008, the Irish built over 873,000 new dwellings. In a country with just 4 million inhabitants, this number was extreme.

More recently, the housing construction frenzy accelerated. Between 2002 and 2006, 378,000 homes were built, while census data recorded just 182,000 new households. Rough For every new household created, the Irish economy built two new dwellings.

In 2008, the construction boom came to a ruinous conclusion. The number of completed dwellings fell 45 percent from the 2006 peak. The collapse in construction activity pushed the Irish economy into an appalling recession. Tax revenues have crumbled, and the Irish government is now running up colossal deficits.

There is worse to come. The European Commission forecast that Ireland’s budget deficit may widen to 11 percent of GDP. Credit default swaps, i.e. the cost of insuring Irish government bonds from default, are hovering around 250 basis points. Wallpapering the deficit with Irish government paper is now extremely expensive.

As a member of the Eurozone, the Irish government has few policy options. It cannot devalue the exchange rate, nor can it adjust monetary policy.

With the cost of borrowing rising, it may have to consider an agonizing deficit reduction programme. This will, of course, only serve to reinforce and prolong the present recession. However, housing bubbles are like that. During the good times, they bestow prosperity, and then they cruelly steal it all back.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

A lot of empty Irish homes, I suppose.

Josh said...

We could do with some new houses here.

Anonymous said...

And yet the Economist this week reports Ireland to have the second highest Per Capita GDP in the Union behind only Luxembourg. Its PCGDP being almost 50% higher than that of the UK.

They will survive I expect.

Anonymous said...

378,000/182,000 does not equal 2.5.

Alice Cook said...

Anon ^6:51,

Thanks for picking that up. I had originally compared household growth (2002-2006) with household construction between 2002-2008, which does give a ratio of 2.5.

However, I realized that this wasn't quite the right thing to do and in the post I quoted the 378,000 number. However, I didn't ammend the formula in the spreadsheet and mistakenly quoted 2.5.

Again, thank you for your helpful comment

Alice

Anonymous said...

I have mixed views on this. I think it is the same as Spain. After all this has eventually blown over, the population of both Spain and Ireland will have relatively cheap access to housing from over-supply.
This will leave them with more disposable income and ultimately a better economy. They will have managed to cut out the "rentier" from their economies.

dearieme said...

Ashes to Ashes
Peat to Peat.....

dearieme said...

More seriously, if you build a lot of houses very quickly it's pretty likely that your road-building won't have kept up. That would mean that many houses are pretty badly placed for commuting. Is that true of Ireland?

irishmaninboston said...

For info on the Irish economy try http://www.finfacts.com/

Housing prices will drop considerable over the next few years
One estimate is a reduction of 85%

Anonymous said...

They will have managed to cut out the "rentier" from their economies.

That will not be allowed to happen - we cannot have people living their own lives!

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