Ajai!
Deputy Director in the European Department of the IMF Ajai Chopra speaks to students at Trinity College, Dublin, within the last hour in a talk organised by the Student Economic Review.
Upshot: the Eurozone’s financial markets are buoyant but its real economy has been lagging, while unemployment is distressingly high in places.
He blames “balance sheet stress”: household, corporate and bank debt and produced a slide showing a Venn diagram the countries that had all three: Ireland, Portugal and Spain having all three.
He said the IMF believes a banking union, together with a single supervisory mechanism in Europe, is the way to fix Europe’s financial woes, the subject of which one can read here. He called for more public debate about the proposed banking union.
Asked for his thoughts on a banking inquiry in Ireland, Mr Chopra pointed to the three previous reports on the crisis: by Patrick Honohan; Peter Nyberg, and Max Watson & Klaus Regling, but declined to comment on whether there should be a parliamentary inquiry.
Then we all did the Harlem Shake.