On the other hand, mysterious non-standard notional assets appear in the accounts of others, obscuring their true negative marked-to-market condition. My @PIIE blog post highlights this for four leading central banks. (A working paper covering another twenty is coming soon).

Some European central banks report negative net worth even though their gold holdings, when valued at market price, make their marked-to-market capital quite high.

Thanks so much to Philip Lane, Agustin Benetrix @tcdeconomics.bsky.social, Alan Barrett @esri.ie ie and all the distinguished participants for my birthday conference @ria.ie and this absorbing special issue of my favourite journal.

Essentially all of this deficit comes from pharmaceuticals. An additional sectoral tariff on pharmaceuticals is the shoe that has not yet dropped. It will.

The 42% comes from dividing the US merchandise trade deficit with Ireland (US$86.7 billion according the US data), by Ireland's exports to the US ($103.3 billion). Half of this is 42%.

You rarely see any 1c (or 2c) coins in Ireland since we introduced a rounding system in October 2015.
It works like this:
Rounding is voluntary and applies only to cash payments;
Your bill is rounded up or down to the nearest 5c;
1c and 2c coins are still legal tender.
Everyone is happy.

Good idea. I’ll do the same. 50 years for me since I finished the same LSE MSc, in the days of Gorman, Sargan, Durbin, Morishima and some youngsters who are now giants (Sen, Dasgupta, Hendry…)

And the patterns are fairly persistent:

(The other outliers are AC=Accommodation and food services, TR=Transportation; ED=Education. Full names in the cso.ie website from which the chart has been calculated.)

I like to think that these restrictions will represent only the first phase of the euro CBDC’s operation. When it’s up and running successfully, they can be removed.