Notizie sull' Economia Irlandese dal Professore Morgan Kelly

Ho parlato piu' volte di Morgan Kelly, un professore di economia Irlandese da me molto rispettato, mai ascoltato, purtroppo, in passato dai politici amici dei costruttori.

In uno dei suoi ultimi articoli fa una previsione sull'economia irlandese nel 2015. Non e' una visione positiva, vi avverto. Premetto che condivido quanto espresso da questo articolo e che la risposta alla domanda conviene restare in Irlanda e' DIPENDE.

Dipende dal settore in cui lavorate e dalla vostra specializzazzione. L'Irlanda attraverso il suo boom prima reale e poi gonfiato ha dato lavoro a tanti irlandesi e cittadini stranieri, me compreso. Oggi un settore e' morto, l'edilizia, con il suo indotto e con i settori beneficianti in difficolta', ovvero ristorazione, retail e tutto cio' che riguarda il tempo libero (pub, night clubs etc). Il boom ha creato pero' anche lavoro nella smart economy, un'area che non crollera' come l'edilizia. Chi e' fortunato da trovarsi in questa area potra' godersi un'Irlanda molto meno costosa, ma anche con qualche problemino soprattutto nelle grandi citta', o meglio al centro di Dublino.

Criminalita' dovuta all'impoverimento della popolazione, mancanza di lavoro per le persone con livello di istruzione basso sono solo alcuni. Tuttavia abbiamo gia' detto molte volte, Bacco prima di tutti, che chi si lamenta di Dublino centro e' fesso perche' il centro di una grande citta' non e' quasi mai un posto dove mettere su famiglia. Nelle grandi citta' vivono studenti in affitto, giovani single o giovani coppie in affitto che vogliono vivere non lontano dal lavoro, giovani e non che han bisogno di trovarsi al centro della movida, il popolo della notte'.

La fortuna di chi vive in Irlanda sta nel fatto che a 10 km dalla citta' si vive nel verde, nella tranquillita' e nella sicurezza. Sono zone popolate prevalentemente da famiglie, con ampi spazi per trascorrere il tempo libero e con abitazioni affordabili anche ora che sembra il crollo dei prezzi non abbia mosso ancora il loro costo al punto piu' basso. A 20/30 minuti di treno ci sono case di 80/100 metri quadri a meno di 250 mila euro. Case, non appartamenti. Case con giardino, un paio di posti auto.

Non vi sto consigliando di restare, non voglio responsabilita'. Ci sono problemi seri questa societa' dovra' affrontare, ma io vi sto mostrando alcuni lati positivi per chi non perdera' il lavoro. Se lo perderete o meno pero' non posso dirvelo io purtroppo.

Quello che preoccupa tanto e' il timore corruzzione. Morgan Kelly sostiene che il governo avra' troppo potere nel direzionare i fondi Nama. Nama di per se' e' una buona idea, il problema e' che saranno essere umani a gestirla. C'e' pericolo i fondi saranno direzionati con criteri poco razionali e molto personali e che non ci saranno fondi per sostenere le fasce deboli che soffriranno tremendamente negli anni che verranno. La difficolta' si dice aguzza l'ingegno ma rende anche l'uomo capace di compiere azioni che normalmente non penserebbe nemmeno di intraprendere. La fame "e' una brutta bestia" dice un proverbio. E' vero.

L'articolo a cui mi sono ispirato e' apparso sull'Irish Times, qui sotto il link ed il testo integrale. Buona lettura.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1229/1224261354227.html

By 2015, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland because it dealt decisively with its banks

WHILE THINGS are hard to predict, the future, especially the situation of the Irish economy, is so stark that even an economist can make some predictions that stand a chance of being right.

Two ghosts of Christmas will haunt Ireland in 2015: jobs and debt.

For 20 years, the Irish economy experienced extraordinary growth. Unfortunately, this growth came from two separate booms that merged imperceptibly into each other. First we had real growth in the 1990s, driven by rising competitiveness and exports. However, after 2000 competitiveness collapsed, and growth came to be driven by a lending bubble without equal in the euro zone.

As Michael Hennigan of Finfacts (www.finfacts.ie) has pointed out, of the half million jobs created in the last decade, only 4,000 were in exporting firms; and fewer people now work in IDA-supported companies than in 2000. The Irish economy has been faking it for a decade.

Now that the property bubble has burst, people hope that exports will once again become the engine of our salvation. The problem is that, back when we were becoming rich by selling houses to each other, we priced ourselves out of world markets. Wages have risen by one-third here compared with Germany since 2000. Restoring competitiveness will be an arduous task where nobody, outside the banks and ESB, will see a pay rise for a decade, and many will take pay cuts.

Whether desirable or otherwise, leaving the euro is not possible for a mundane reason. Changing currencies takes a lot of organisation, as we saw when the euro was introduced. If the Government announced that a New Irish Pound will be introduced in 12 months, everyone would rush out to withdraw their savings in euro and wipe out the banks.

Prolonged mass unemployment is a disaster not only for its victims, but for all society. The great Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson showed how the disappearance of low-skilled jobs in the US during the 1970s led to the social collapse of black ghettos.

In Ireland for the last 20 years we saw this process working in reverse, as rising employment turned what had been sink estates into decent, if not wonderful, places to live. Finding a job does more for the disadvantaged than a legion of social workers: people’s sense of self-worth is transformed by being able to earn the money to do ordinary things like own a car, buy toys for their kids at Christmas, and take their family on holiday.

While many commentators argue that the benefits of the Celtic Tiger flowed exclusively to the wealthy and connected, this is nonsense. The benefits went overwhelmingly to ordinary people in the form of something that Ireland had never seen before: abundant jobs. By 2015 we will have seen what happens when jobs disappear forever, particularly from less educated men who were able to earn a good living in construction. In effect, Ireland is at the start of an enormous, unplanned social experiment on how rising unemployment affects crime, domestic violence, drug abuse, suicide and a litany of other social pathologies.

We will be forced to discover the consequences when people, who had worked hard to make decent lives for themselves and their children, find themselves reduced to nothing. Less than nothing in fact because, unlike the unemployed in the past, people now losing jobs are weighed down with debt and facing the terrifying prospect of losing their homes.

Debt will be the second ghost of Christmas 2015. Back in 1997, when exports drove real growth, Irish banks lent little by international standards. By 2008, Ireland had twice as much debt for its size as the average industrial economy: banks were lending a third more to property developers alone than they had been lending to everyone in Ireland in 2000.

It was this tidal wave of credit that inflated house prices and launched the construction boom that drove wages and government spending to unsustainable levels.

To fund this suicidal lending, Irish banks borrowed heavily internationally, and now must pay it back fast as the world realises that our recent economic miracle was less in the spirit of Adam Smith than of Bernard Madoff. As Irish bank lending returns to ordinary international levels, property prices will fall by at least two-thirds from their peaks.

However, five years from now, property prices could have been driven far lower than that by a deluge of sales of unsold, foreclosed and abandoned homes.

Mass mortgage defaults caused by unemployment and falling house prices are the next act of the Irish economic tragedy. As well as bankrupting our worthless banks all over again, the human cost of tens of thousands of families losing their homes will be enormous but, because the Government has already exhausted the State’s resources taking care of developers with Nama (National Asset Management Agency), there is very little that can be done to help these people.

Most people, of course, will not lose their jobs and homes. However, even they will be forced painfully to relearn something our parents already knew: beyond a small mortgage, debt swiftly turns into pure poison that will eat away your prosperity and happiness.

One response to large-scale home repossessions that will be attempted is to buy ghost estates for public housing to accommodate evicted home owners, providing ample opportunities for good old fashioned petty corruption.

For grand corruption, though, we will have to look to Nama. By allowing the banks to dictate the terms of their bailout, the bank rescue was turned into the most lucrative and audacious Tiger Kidnapping in the history of the State, with the difference that, like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles , the bankers held themselves hostage.

Bad banks like Nama were tried on a large scale in the early 1930s in the US, Austria and Germany; and proved to be profoundly corrupt and corrupting institutions, whose primary purpose was to funnel money to politically connected businesses. The German bank is best remembered for setting up what we would now call a special purpose vehicle to fund the presidential election campaign of the odious Paul Hindenberg.

Bad banks do not just happen to be corrupt and anti-democratic institutions, it is what they are designed to be. Effectively, bad banks give governments the power to choose which of a country’s most powerful oligarchs will be forced into bankruptcy, and which will be resuscitated to emerge even more powerful than before.

Nama will get to pick which of the fattest hogs of Irish development will be sliced up and fed, at taxpayer expense, to better connected hogs (remember that Nama has been allocated at least €6.5 billion, considerably more than the Government saved by draconian budget cuts, to “lend” to favoured clients).

While Nama may have momentous political consequences, it has already failed economically: the Irish banks are still zombies, reliant on transfusions of European Central Bank funding to survive until losses on mortgages and business loans finally wipe them out. In the next few months we will discover if the State bankrupts itself by nationalising the banks; or if it has the intelligence to free itself from bank losses by turning the foreign creditors of banks into their owners, as Iceland has just done with Kaupthing bank.

It is ironic that by 2015, having devalued its currency and dealt decisively with its banks, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland.

Morgan Kelly