I have been busy, busy in Dublin today. No time (or energy) for a lot of blogging. But here is a picture of the Irish economy – the Irish price level is down 10% since the end of 2007.
Please tell me whether European monetary policy is easy or tight…
The Market Monetarist 
Alex Salter
/ May 1, 2012Are you implying that the tightness of European monetary policy can be inferred from a falling price level in a single country? What if prices everywhere except Ireland were rising?
jpirving
/ May 2, 2012@ Alex Salter
It doesn’t matter if ECB policy is ‘overall’ tight or loose if the regional variation in nominal spending and price trends is wide enough. Germany is doing ok on the Euro, and driving the EMU wide statistical accounts, but other members are choking. This is a loud and clear signal that the Euro is a disaster for Ireland, and in light of other data, that the Euro project is a failure. It would be one thing to have transient regional differences in inflation, but this is outright deflation. For years. How does the ECB reconcile Ireland’s monetary needs with those of Germany?
Marcus Nunes
/ May 2, 2012Lars – Coincidentally and very unusually, I had a post today and a version of that graph was also shown. And other characters in the post are Germany (the “bad guy”) and Spain (the “fall guy”):
http://thefaintofheart.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/in-search-of-lost-time/
grahamdcox
/ May 2, 2012Good to see the deflator being used.
That is 4.6% pa in the first ten years of the chart.
Would be more interesting with the non-Irish liabilities of Irish banks as that was the monetary transmission mechanism.