An economist for Ireland

Has the Central Bank hit the target in its trawl for a new chief economist?

This week, it announced it has hired Gabriel Fagan from the ECB to take charge of its gang of wonks. It turns out he is a great hire for a nation obsessed with property bubbles and crashes. Back in 1992, Fagan co-authored a technical paper for the Central Bank called Testing for a Speculative Bubble in Irish Land Prices. Okay, so he was more than a decade too early but at least he was on the right track, which is more than can be said for some of his predecessors.

He didn’t blather on about “soft landings” either.