This is a new one to us but this video presents a thought provoking set of statistics on globalisation and the changing world of work. While it’s presented from a US perspective it asks plenty of questions for Irish viewers about our place in the global economy of the next decade.
Billionaire financier Dermot Desmond spoke yesterday in a public interview with Newstalk radio station at the National College of Ireland and entertained the audience with his views on the world of business and what has driven him in his wide and varied career and investments.
He opposed the National Asset Management Agency, the State’s “bad bank”, saying that he preferred for the problem property loans to remain within the banks and to be worked out over time. He raised an important point - if the Government feels that an additional €5 billion is enough for Allied Irish Banks and €3.5 billion for Bank of Ireland, why should there have to be further write-downs on their property loans? (more…)
There has been a bit of discussion on this blog and elsewhere about whether Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner or not, with people pointing out that there are only Nobel prizes for literature, chemistry, physiology, peace, physics and medicine, but not the dismal science.
While Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor who has become something of a household name here following his comments on the Irish economy, is indeed listed on the Nobel Prize web site as a laureate, he did not technically win a Nobel. Prof Krugman and other economists are actually recognised with The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. That award was set up by the Swedish Central Bank (”Sveriges Riksbank”) in 1968. In contrast the other prizes have been awarded every year since 1901.
Pedants can now rest easy but use of the Nobel Prize for Economics short-hand will no doubt persist. It should be noted that even on his New York Times bio, it is stated that Krugman was awarded “the Nobel Prize in Economics”.
Anyway all of this is really just a distraction. Like it or not Krugman is one of the world’s most high profile and highly respected economists and his prognosis for Ireland is extremely worrying. Questioning his credentials does nothing to help us re-build the economy.
It seems our feature in the technology section last Friday on the best financial blogs has attracted us some new readers. Market strategist Barry Ritholtz picked up on the article during the week and posted some quotes on The Big Picture Blog, which has generated 47 comments at this stage, including some off beat comments on the name of our contributor Proinsias O’Mahony.
Speaking of how the Irish and our economy are viewed overseas, in today’s paper Arthur Beesley looks at the task facing Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan on his tour of European financial capitals next month. Our correspondents around the world have also reported on how our economic and banking crisis is being covered by the media in their locations.
Finally Proinsias’s blog feature spurred Declan Fallon from Irish investor information start-up Zignals to get in touch. Declan writes a highly technical but extremely useful blog called Fallond Stock Picks. We are not the only ones who rate it - Forbes have included it in their best-of-web listing, it is a featured blog on Finviz, and apparently got 15,000 page views in March. Declan also contributes to the Zignals blog. If you invest yourself and are not aware of Zignals get over there. With the mission of bringing the tools of fund managers to the masses, it allows you create your own rules (e.g. APPL gains more than 2% in a single day) and then sends you a text or email when the conditions are met.
PS If you are still scratching your head over to the headline, click through the link to last week’s article on financial blogs.
A zero interest rate meant they were never the sexiest of savings options, but the Prize Bond Company is now more popular than Susan Boyle. Their staggering 95 per cent sales surge last year means that not everyone is adopting what Bank of Ireland admonishingly calls a “biscuit tin” mentality in their bid to avoid the banks.
The Prize Bond Company says almost half of its €279 million sales in 2008 came from prize bonds purchased in September and October - exactly the time when nervousness about the security of bank deposits was strong enough to prompt Government intervention. Sales settled back down as Christmas approached - although the only prize bonds I personally own, if I could ever find them, were once Christmas gifts.
The bonds have been selling like cheap hamburgers so far in 2009. It’s easy to see why, and not just because there’s a prize winner laughing insanely on the Prize Bonds home page. (Although that could actually be Glenda Gilson on a minimalist day - so hard to tell in black and white.) Interest rates on deposits are paltry anyway - when are they not? - and you would have to be very brave indeed to opt for the kind of stock market-linked lump sum bonds that Bank of Ireland was flogging when it paused to remind potential customers that simply stashing their cash at home was “dangerous”.
Despite the fact that more than €20 million in prizes was awarded to 148,000 people last year, it’s hard to find anyone who owns up to having won a prize bond cash prize. But then the relatively low profile of its four €1 million jackpot draws each year can only be good news for existing bond holders who would prefer to keep down the number of people who are in it to win it. However, the company is discussing the logistics of a televised draw - at the moment, it takes place at Dublin’s GPO on Friday mornings.
Serial numbers at the ready then, if you really don’t want to entrust your cash to the banks. Biscuit tins are for biscuits.
Aerial-dependent television viewers might not be too happy with the prospect of having to upgrade to digital terrestrial television (DTT) in order to stop their screens going disconcertingly snowy. But their reluctance to embrace DTT may yet pale in comparison to that of the cash-haemorrhaging media consortiums that were once eager to snap up the three commercial multiplexes on offer from the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI).
The digital dividend has waned. Last July, fresh from the victory of winning the three commercial DTT licences, Boxer DTT chairwoman Lucy Gaffney was promising to bring “a new dimension in television viewing” to Ireland. Today, Boxer pressed the off button on its DTT ambitions. Now the BCI is depending on the One Vision consortium to gallantly step into the breach. That this consortium comprises a job-shedding TV3, a football rights-losing Setanta Sports and a cost-cutting Eircom does not bode well.
Faced with transmission charges from RTÉ and the possibility that multi-channel seeking consumers are already Sky-plussed to the max, the revenues no longer stacked up for Boxer. In any case, most of its potential subscribers would not have arrived until much closer to the great analogue signal switch-off planned for the end of 2012, and they would have come from those households that currently live on the aerial diet of free-to-air channels.
But free-to-air services will still be available after 2012 under RTÉ’s public service DTT multiplex. Why, having withstood the onslaught of digital cable and satellite marketeers, would four-channel land suddenly bother to pay more? These viewers, obliged to get a set-top box installed, will still end up with additional channels for their trouble: the free-to-air multiplex will eventually include up to eight channels. As well as RTÉ 1, RTÉ 2, TV3 and TG4, there are proposals in place for an RTÉ 3 channel dominated by archive material, an RTÉ 1 +1 catch-up service broadcasting the channel on a one-hour delay, an Oireachtas channel and a new Irish film channel. Recession permitting, of course.
RTÉ is chasing the “synergies” - or, in other words, the revenues - from lending out its transmission network to a commercial multiplex operator. It was said to have been somewhat crushed not to have actually been that commercial multiplex operator: the Easy TV consortium, under which it had joined forces with UPC parent Liberty Global, came third in the BCI’s competition last year. But having been bumped up to second in the queue, it may yet find itself promoted to first place.
Seems we were closer to Boston than Berlin all along, if Nobel award winning economist Paul Krugman is to be believed. Following on from his comments last week at an event for the foreign press, Mr Krugman devotes his column in today’s New York Times to the problems facing our economy and what the US can learn from them.
He suggests that free market excesses drove our housing bubble to the point that “Ireland became in effect a cool, snake-free version of coastal Florida”. Krugman believes that the last remaining hope for Ireland is that a recovery in our big trading partners prompts an export-led recovery at home. Nice to see he’s read the “twenty economists” opinion piece carried in our paper last Friday, which suggests there is little point in establishing Nama without nationalising the banks.
The last line of Krugman’s column should probably be pinned on all the noticeboards in the Central Bank and the Department of Finance:
“And the lesson of Ireland is that you really, really don’t want to put yourself in a position where you have to punish your economy in order to save your banks.”
What will recession and its accompanying cutbacks and levies do to income inequality in Ireland? The excesses of the boom years were shared, if shared is the right word, by a group small enough to be called a cohort. But the findings of British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett suggest that even those near the top of the income pyramid suffer when income gaps widen: (in)equality, rather than absolute levels of wealth or poverty, is what determines how (dys)functional a society will be.
According to their new book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness and long working hours - are more likely to occur in less equal societies. Their analysis of obesity in a chapter subtitled “wider incomes, wider waists” is one area where Ireland is just the wrong side of the line (and the USA is off the scale).
As a result of their research, Wilkinson and Pickett, both academics at UK universities, have founded an equality campaigning body called The Equality Trust. Their book is well worth a read. Japan and, inevitably, Sweden are the two countries that come out the best in terms of both income equality and the incidence of social and environmental problems. But what is interesting is that Japan and Sweden are very different societies in other ways, they note, and not just because of the position of women: how they get their greater income equality is very different.
Whereas Sweden achieves it through redistributive taxes and benefits and a large welfare state, in Japan, public social expenditure is among the lowest of the major developed countries. Japan gets its income equality not from redistribution but from a greater equality of earnings before taxes and benefits.
“So big government may not always be necessary to gain the advantages of a more equal society,” they say. But it is the assumption that “I’m okay, as long as I’m raking in more than most other people” that they really hope to dispel: hierarchies are bad for all of our health. People shouldn’t be “cowed by the idea that higher taxes on the rich will lead to their mass emigration and economic catastrophe”, they conclude: more egalitarian countries live better in every way that counts.
Barry O’Halloran
Education minister Batt O’Keeffe is running the gauntlet of angry teachers’ trade unions at the moment, but he’s certain to face an even more vocal group shortly: third level students.
A group in his own home town of Cork began protesting on Wednesday outside UCC and there will be a lot more in coming weeks. They’re angry because it looks certain the Government is going to end nominally free third-level education.
At this stage, it’s pretty predictable how the debate will pan out. The Government, in the person of O’Keeffe, will be cast as the bad guy, the students as scapegoated victims.
The Government, colleges and students need to face two facts here. There is no constitutional right to a free third level education and ”free” third level education has failed to deliver.
Paul Krugman, the nobel laureate who predicted much of the current economic crisis made a few remarks in passing about Ireland at a talk with the foreign press in New York on Tuesday.
What’s interesting is that is that Krugman, who presumably does not devote that much time to Ireland, has honed in on the massive theoretical exposure of the state to the banks under the guarantee. This, after a fashion, validates the NAMA approach on the basis that it converts a theoretical €500 billion figure which in effect makes us bankrupt to the cursory gaze of the global markets into a tangible €90 billion, which merely beggars us.
The relevant extracts are below and the full transcript can be accessed at http://fpc.state.gov/121662.htm.
Toxic loans, bad banks, non-performing economies… Who doesn’t feel like unleashing a stream of toxic abuse, bad language and expletive-loaded invective every time the next instalment of the above saga unfolds? Thankfully, when Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It returns to BBC television later this year, viewers with those yearnings can count on the fact that frequent and inventive swearing will be aimed at everyone involved the whole sorry casino capitalism endgame. Probably at point blank range.
When he was in Ireland in February for a Q&A after a showing of his new film In the Loop at the Dublin Film Festival, Iannucci promised that the next series of Westminster comedy The Thick of It would feature taxpayer-swindling bankers, their legally protected bonuses and their carefully orchestrated non-apologies. Good. As we settle down into 15 years-plus of our own local toxic asset handling, seeing PR rottweiler Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) spew vicious and creatively foul-mouthed attacks on the fictional equivalents of Fred the Shred et al could be the best kind of catharsis available.
In the meantime, In the Loop, the deeply funny movie spin-off that also boasts Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker (i.e. Alistair Campbell), is on general release from Friday. It’s about the run-up to a war very much like the one we had in Iraq six years ago, in that now dim, distant past when the possibilities offered by securitisation and subprime loans were still flashing dollar signs in the eyes of banking credit committees across the globe. Ex-Sopranos actor James Gandolfini, last seen with Carmela and AJ in the diner, is in it playing a nice guy. Politicians bumble profusely. And yes, the language is even more noxious than NAMA.
One group of people who don’t have much of a voice in society had what could be their only source of income halved in yesterday’s budget. This group is people under 20 who are in receipt of the means-tested jobseekers’ allowance payment. According to Brian Lenihan, being forced to live on just €100 a week will “incentivise the young unemployed to participate in training programmes”.
Uh huh. So now let us take a look at what training programmes the Government has made available to these allegedly (by implication) un-incentivised teenagers who find themselves among the 370,000-plus on the Live Register. After months of repeated calls to respond to the surge in unemployment (including the permanent shift away from heavy dependence on construction-related jobs), the Government finally offered up a few suggestions as to how it might tackle that whole problem.
Annex F to the Supplementary Budget, subtitled Supporting Those Who Lose Their Jobs, begins by saying that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Social and Family Affairs have “agreed a joint approach to activation” on the training and re-skilling front, which presumably translates as “we’re going to do something now”. (more…)
Despite almost two months of dire warnings about the contents of today’s emergency budget - euphemistically known in official circles as the Supplementary Budget - it is generally agreed to be even worse than expected for middle to high income earners. “This is taxation with a vengeance,” noted Ulster Bank economist Pat McArdle this afternoon.
But if there is one single measure that sums up the carnage, it is the cancellation of the Christmas bonus paid to social welfare recipients. Expect plenty of newspaper articles tomorrow with the same headline as this blog post.
The Government said cancelling Christmas would yield €156 million in the eight months of 2009 and €171 million in a full year. The cut equals 2 per cent of the income of a person who relies solely on social welfare payments. While some deflation-watching commentators dismayed at the crippingly high rates of taxes that beckon would have preferred the Government to have taken a bigger swipe at social welfare spending, the loss of the Christmas bonus will no doubt be felt come December among the nation’s most vulnerable citizens: children living in poverty.
Rather than kill morale in this way, the Government could have opted, to pick just one example, to introduce a 2 per cent rather than a 1 per cent levy on life assurance premiums, a measure which is expected to generate €140 million in a full year. Even if this levy also applies to mortgage protection policies, which it presumably does, it is fair to say that life assurance is a product that is generally paid by wealthier individuals - those who will still be able to splash out come the festive season.
Regardless of the content of this afternoon’s Budget speech it smashed a couple of records in terms of internet traffic. The Irish Neutral Exchange (INEX), the organisation which allows Irish ISPs and large corporates to efficiently exchange their internet traffic, had its record traffic volumes this afternoon. Just after 4.00 pm traffic spiked to 7.284Gbits/sec. The previous record was 5.345Gbits/sec on the last Budget day in October ‘08.
Meanwhile over on Twitter “bludget” became the fastest growing term in use on the service, or top “trending topic” as Twitter puts it. The term bludget came about after Marian Finucane stumbled over the word budget on her show last weekend. Suzy Byrne aka political blogger Maman Poulet liked it so much, because it captured the expected bludgeoning that people would receive, that she suggested it as the tag that people should put on their budget related Twitter posts. I wonder have the people at Twitter HQ in San Francisco figured out what Bludget is yet?
Both stats show the appetite that now exists for online business news. Maybe Mr Lenihan should have considered an internet levy rather than the mooted SMS tax which never appeared.
In a bid to keep consumer enthusiasm for cross-border shopping in check, the “old reliables” were split firmly into two camps by the Government this afternoon: those that were deemed able to sustain a hike in excise duties without prompting a mass exodus to Newry, and those that weren’t.
So in the first corner, long-spluttering nicotine aficionados will be coughing up another 25 cent per packet of 20, while diesel dependents will be paying 5 cent extra in excise duty. But in the second corner, and lucky to get away with it on the day that was in it, are drinkers and petrol users.
Brian Lenihan said there was “no scope” for additional duties on either alcohol or petrol given the few hundred million that is already being lost to Northern Ireland through cross-border shopping. The crucial point here, especially in relation to alcohol, is that it is the desire to fill their car boots full of party-pack quantities of beer and wine that spurs people to get in their cars and head North in the first place, but during their sojourn they also pop into Sainsbury’s and do their weekly grocery shopping while they’re at it.
Of course, there was no money in the public kitty to do the one thing that might genuinely curb cross-border shopping rather than just contain it: reduce the 6.5 percentage point VAT differential between the Republic and the UK.
The abolition of mortgage interest tax relief for non first-time buyers, which includes everyone in year eight or more of their mortgage, is just the latest example of Government tinkering with this relief.
At every budget opportunity since the housing market reached its inglorious peak in early 2007, the Government has increased the relief for more recent buyers and decreased it for more established homeowners - an act that could be interpreted as guilt for its part in driving up property prices to levels that would make a New Yorker blush.
In recent years, the monthly value of this interest relief for a first-time buyer, a status that lasts for the first seven years of the mortgage, has increased from €66 to €133, then to €166. Finally, last October, the Government introduced three different first-time buyer rates, with those in the first two years of their mortgage getting tax relief of €208 a month and the value steadily reducing thereafter, with the tax credit for “other buyers” reducing from €100 to €75 a month. This afternoon, the Minister announced that he was abolishing mortgage interest tax relief for these “other buyers” and restricting the relief to the first seven years of the mortgage.
So is this right? People who bought their first homes in the last seven years are lumbered with mortgages that are exponentially higher than older buyers who were picking curtain patterns and putting skylights in their attics long before anyone in Ireland had even heard of IKEA. As interest rates increased, so too did the monthly tax credits. Except interest rates were already falling by the time the Government increased the rates of relief again last October: why else increase the rates again except as some kind of compensatory measure to those unfortunate enough to buy at the top of the market?
Brian Lenihan signalled today that the relief will eventually be phased out for all, presumably as the generation of peak property buyers becomes a proportionately smaller chunk of the total ranks of homeowners. Encouraging people to buy homes they may not be able to afford will no longer be part of the tax system.
Even if you agree that the Government’s structuring of the now greatly expanded income tax and health levies, which includes bringing people on the minimum wage into the tax net, is “progressive”, to use Brian Lenihan’s word - and I have a feeling that a lot of people won’t - the intended use of these extra revenues is galling.
In 2007, 5 per cent of tax revenues was used to repay the interest on the national debt. In just two years, that percentage has increased to 11 per cent, Lenihan said in his speech this afternoon. “This is dead money that should be used to provide vital public services,” he said. Quite.
A person on the minimum wage - circa €17,500 a year - will have to pay €350 a year or €7 a week under the new levies, or 2 per cent of their income, from May 1st. Just last October, the Government was pressured into doing a u-turn on its decision to include such vulnerable, low-paid workers in the original 1 per cent levy, with many commentators astounded that such a radical change should be made to tax policy. All that has changed as of today.
“Too many to do not pay tax at all,” said Lenihan this afternoon, referring to the high-net worth brigade that is adept at tax avoidance. But it remains to be seen if the Government is successful in bringing the tax-shy rich into the tax net: sadly, for minimum wage earners, they are much easier prey for a Government that needs to raise cash quickly.
And now over to Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner…
supplement 
noun
Something which is added to something else in order to improve it or complete it; something extra: e.g. The money the Government raises in its emergency budget today will be used as a supplement to pour into the Exchequer coffers (and stop the country from going bankrupt).
2 a part of a magazine or newspaper, either produced separately or as part of the magazine or newspaper: e.g. The Irish Times will publish a special supplement on today’s budget with tomorrow’s newspaper.
supplement verb
to add something to something to make it larger or better: e.g. We will supplement our coverage of the budget in the newspaper with online updates, video feed of the Minister’s speech and occasional fits of blogging later today and throughout the week as the fallout continues. Find our dedicated budget mini-site here.
supplementary 
adjective e.g. the Government’s official name for the emergency budget is the Supplementary Budget. If you have a supplementary income, or indeed any income at all, get ready to pay supplementary taxes…
A blog post by respected US journalist Timothy Egan on his New York Times hosted Outposts blog has whipped up a bit of a storm - 268 comments since it was published on April Fools Day. Titled The Orphans of Ireland the post comes from a recent holiday that Egan took in Dingle where he was shocked by the number of empty houses in the Irish countryside. Commentators seem to take particular umbrage that he seems to rely on Irish-American cliches for much of his view of Ireland:
“Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle.”
Egan is not the first to paint quite a patronising image of our sudden economic implosion and it’s not just Fianna Fail ministers that are starting to sound the warning bell about innacurate coverage damaging our reputation in international markets. The editors at US magazine Foreign Policy have called on journalists to take back innacurate comments about Ireland and Iceland. They say that much coverage has included ”lots of bloated and condescending scrim on how Ireland and Iceland are the magically quaint fairy-lands of leprechauns, vikings, alcohol, and the in-bred!”
So do you think we deserve the beating we are taking in the international press?
Paddy Power has opened the book on who will replace Dermot Mannion as chief executive of Aer Lingus, now that the former Emirates executive has pressed the ejector seat button. Somewhat inevitably, Michael “spend a pound to spend a penny” O’Leary pops up as a 100-1 shot. (The odds for O’Leary’s recommendation for the job, ICTU head David Begg, are sadly not quoted.) But what does it actually take to be an airline boss?
1. Good gambling skills: Running an airline is a high risk business, with ample opportunities for burning huge piles of cash, as Aer Lingus is currently all too aware. In these days of volatile oil prices, knowing how much of your fuel requirements to hedge, and at what price, is crucial. Locking in at $100 a barrel only to see oil prices immediately dip below $50 is going to make you look stupid, but not as stupid as you will look if you snap up a couple of Boeings at the top of the market, only for aircraft prices to plummet and your previously reliable seat sale enthusiasts to en masse discover the joys of trains, ferries, staycations and teleconferencing.
2. Chutzpah: If Michael O’Leary’s repetitive spiels and crazy stunts didn’t bring in business, he’d have shut up years ago. No matter what question the man is asked, the answer will include the phrase “lowest fares”, plus one or, at a stretch, two other ideas that he wants to get across. Never mind that he’s obliged to spend the rest of the time defending Ryanair’s “discretionary” charges to horrified media folk: every one who hears him speak is reminded ad nauseum that if you are willing to book online, travel light and engage in the frenzied “oh no, not the middle seat” boarding procedure, Ryanair will be the cheapest flight. Shunning the spotlight and sending your flunkies out before the cameras, as Willie Walsh initially tried to do during the British Airways’ T5 baggage fiasco, isn’t going to work for too long.
3. An Irish passport: Irish men head up three of the largest airlines in the world: Walsh at BA, O’Leary at Ryanair and Dubliner Alan Joyce at Qantas, where he is in the process of cutting 1,500 jobs in a bid to reduce costs. Joyce, incidentally, is a 40-1 shot for the Aer Lingus job, which he is unlikely to want: like all airlines, Qantas may have its troubles, especially after a proposed merger with BA became unstuck, but, unlike Aer Lingus it is still profitable, while its network of long-haul routes and code share alliances means it’s too big to be dismissed as a “small regional airline” by O’Leary. According to the Paddy Power list, the next CEO of our national flag carrier will be as Irish as the shamrocks on its airplane tails.
Mannion concedes that what the new Aer Lingus boss really needs is “fresh thinking and new ideas”. Shareholders clearly agree, as the airline’s share price bounced 8 per cent this morning. With what O’Leary called a “good, bloody, deep recession” still gripping the aviation industry, and every move the airline takes subject to intense Government and public scrutiny, one wonders what Paddy Power favourites Niall Walsh (current deputy CEO) and Seán Coyle (current finance director) will come up with on their application forms.
“Cutting respite care grant - backward step”, read the posters. But as a sizeable group from the Carer’s Association were marshalled by Gardai on the corner of Kildare Street this morning en route to the Dáil, in nearby no.6 Kildare Street economists were affirming the need for ”unpalatable” decisions to be taken in next week’s Budget.
It seems unlikely that the nation’s estimated 161,000 carers, who are angry about the deferral of a national carer’s strategy and now fear cutbacks in the respite care grant, would have been too happy to hear economists from the Republic’s three biggest stockbroking firms - Davy, Goodbody and NCB - speak of such measures as cuts in welfare payments to match deflation and the broadening of the tax base.
Presenting their joint multi-year strategy for how Ireland can get out of the current economic mess it’s in, the stockbrokers joked that such co-operation between the three competitors was “unprecedented”, given as NCB economist Bernard McAlinden noted, “normally we like to just ignore each other”. In order to replicate that spirit of cohesion around the country, the Government needs to step up the manner in which it is communicating the seriousness of the economic crisis to the public, it was suggested.
McAlinden said he believed that social cohesion had improved - at least compared to the 1980s. But he acknowledged that this was a subjective view. ”Fairness is at the heart of it,” he said. “You need to see fairness and you need to see the [social] security net defined.”
But is any amount of PR enough to stop a riot and/or real suffering if welfare payments are cut in response to CPI deflation? “You need a lot of communication to pull that off,” McAlinden admitted.
