This Thursday, the UK government will introduce a budget with significant tax increases and spending cuts. The UK press are largely reporting this as necessary to close a “black hole” in the UK’s public finances. It is frequently suggested that much of this black hole is a direct result of the fiscal profligacy proposed by the short-lived Truss government. The reporting generally suggests that a contractionary budget is a matter of common sense—books need to be balanced and after September’s chaotic events, the new government needs to demonstrate to financial markets that it is serious about f ..read more

The students union at my university are staging a protest tomorrow against the university’s management. It being Valentine’s day, the campaign features a broken heart and a slogan #ItsNotMeItsUCD. Other tweets in the campaign complain about how UCD has become a “commercialised university”, use the hashtag #NotaBusiness and contain dark murmerings about “corporate interests”. The campaign wants action from UCD management on a number of issues. I fully understand student unhappiness with campus rents being high, with campus services not being better and various other ways in which UCD has sough ..read more

In the past week, I’ve come across two different pieces (one by the BIS and one by the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility) warning that the maturity of public debt in advanced economies has been shortening and this could have fiscal implications during a recovery. This warning might seem surprising since the Covid crisis and the low long-term interest rates of recent years have seen governments issue lots of long-term debt. Indeed, conventional measures of average public debt maturity are increasing. In the euro area, the average maturity of public debt has increased from about six years a ..read more

I see that many UK universities are announcing they are staying mainly online for 2021-22, with only small group teaching happening in person. I am not going to judge whether this is the right policy for the upcoming year because public health is not my area of expertise. However, Manchester University have announced that this is a permanent change and I suspect many others are considering this option. Personally, I think making decisions now to permanently get rid of in-person lectures would be a mistake, both on the substance of the issue and on the timing and processes for making a decision ..read more

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak on “Do Central Banks Control the Price Level?” by the Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) at their annual conference. The panel also included Frances Coppola and Scott Fullwiler. My presentation is here and you can find video of the session here. I went last, starting at 56 minutes.   ..read more

PublicPolicy.ie held its second online conference today on “Ireland’s COVID19 Crisis Response: Perspectives from Social Science.”   I gave a talk on a panel titled “EU Dimensions of a Policy Response”.  I mainly discussed the role of the ECB, covering some of more extreme potential measures it could take. I discuss monetary financing, helicopter money and the idea of the Eurosystem selling all its gold and returning the money to governments. Here are the slides. The session was recorded. I will put in a link to the recording when I find it ..read more

This term, I taught a new module in macroeconomics to starting PhD students. The lecture notes are available here ..read more

I have written two new briefing papers for the European Parliament on ECB-related issues. The first focuses on assessing Mario Draghi’s term as ECB President. The second provides recommendations for the likely upcoming review of monetary policy strategy ..read more

On Friday June 7, I presented a paper at the EUROFRAME conference hosted by ESRI in Dublin. I presented “The Euro at 20: Successes, Problems, Progress and Threats”. The paper is available here and the slides are here ..read more

After a chaotic two months in British politics and with little time remaining before the UK is set to leave the EU, its parliament has now requested the EU replace the crucial backstop protocol in the Brexit withdrawal agreement with some other set of unspecified “alternative arrangements.”  The Prime Minister reversing course on the deal she agreed after two years of intensive negotiations was never likely to go down well with the EU27 and the immediate negative response from Donald Tusk suggests there will be no re-opening of negotiations. Simply ignoring this latest request may work out for ..read more