Reasons To Be Cheerful #6

Swiss business school IMD publishes an annual World Competitiveness Survey. In the 2012 survey published earlier in the Summer covering 59 countries, Ireland comes out quite well, and is improving. As highlighted by Digital Times here, we are

• 1st for availability of skilled labour
• 1st for flexibility and adaptability of workforce
• 1st for investment incentives
• 1st for attitudes towards globalisation
• 2nd for business legislation-openness to foreign investors
• 2nd for large corporations that are efficient by international standards
• 2nd for adaptability of companies
• 4th for Corporate Tax rate on profit and real corporate taxes

Why is our overall ranking still only 20th out of 59 ? You are not getting that information in this post - look at the title, please ! - but here's a hint: electricity.

Nonetheless, it remains true that "we" are clearly doing some things very right.

Reasons To Be Cheerful #5

Via Gerard O'Neill again

Irish sales managers and directors ... are increasingly of the view that the worst is over in the Irish market, with recovery coming slowly but eventually. And one good test of their optimism - one in four sales managers expects to expand their sales team this year

The full survey is here.

Reasons To Be Cheerful #4

From Gerard O'Neill's Turbulence Ahead blog:

We already have the highest level of share of population in education of any country in the European Union (according to Eurostat), and our level of participation in education beyond the compulsory school age is also high (85% of Irish 18 year olds are still in education versus just 50% of British and German 18 year olds).

(Emphasis added by me.)

Reasons To be Cheerful # 003

Inflation has started to fall. Indeed, lazy journalists who greet such news with the declaration that "the cost of living is falling" are right this time. Prices are actually falling and are expected to fall faster. See here for details from Ulster Bank.

It has taken a while to add this third reason - quite a commentary on the difficult times through which we are passing. Many of you feel, no doubt, that the election of Barack Obama should have attracted the "gong", and it did indeed cheer many people up, including yours truly.

However, in selecting news for this feature of the website, I have decided to avoid as much as possible developments which are any of the following

• partisan
• already widely known and celebrated
• potentially bad news really

Of course, every apparently piece of good news has the potential to be bad news in disguise, and not everyone will share my view of what is good. For example, undoubtedly owners of ships had a diametrically opposite viewpoint in regard to my first reason to be cheerful. (The second is here; they will all be conveniently corralled together in a section of their own before long, I promise.)

It is, I suggest, unavoidably a matter of judgement, and what you get here is mine (whose did you expect ?). I offer it de bene esse as (some) lawyers would say, or FWIW as (some) internet users and (some) texters would express it. For what it is worth, in other words.

Reasons To be Cheerful # 002

One of the factors behind the recent financial market panics was ignorance on the part of an amazing proportion of market participants, and of those whose money was invested, as to the real amount of liabilities owed by financial firms (not just banks). "It is very hard to determine the location of the risk, partly because of the chain of interlinked securities, which does not allow the final resting place of the risk to be determined. But also, because of derivatives it is even harder: negative basis trades moved CDO risk and credit derivatives created additional long exposure to subprime mortgages." (Gary Gorton via Tyler Cowen)

The demise of Lehman Brothers was a shock not just for the obvious reason that an old, large and widely respected institution had succumbed but because of a fear that, with it gone, others would lose huge amounts on credit default swaps (CDS) with Lehman and a domino effect could engulf large swathes of the global financial services industry.

A figure of about $400 billion was widely mentioned as the amount of the possible fall-out. Via Felix Salmon, the good news (very) is that the total was only $6 billion.

Traders are accordingly much less nervous and governments are taking over banks that are not quite as "ropey" as once feared.

Rejoice !