Cantillon: IMF may bring Permanant solution to PTSB legacy issue

It's been a busy week for Permanent TSB. On Wednesday, chief executive Jeremy Masding and an entourage of senior officials from the bank and the department of finance travelled to Brussels to meet with EU competition authorities about the bank's restructuring plan, the latest iteration of which was submitted by the Government in August.

Permo has essentially been split into core and non-core activities with group not expected to return to profit until 2017.

On Thursday, Donegal-based Fianna Fáil TD Charlie McConalogue asked the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan for an update on progress with the bank's restructuring.

“There is no formal deadline in place for the Commission to respond to the updated version of the [restructuring] plan. However, the deputy may have noted that Permanent TSB, at its interim results presentation on August 29th, stated it was aiming for approval before year end and I have no reason at this point to believe otherwise,” was the minister’s reply.

Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund once again highlighted its concern about the pace of recovery at PTSB.

The Washington DC body said the implementation of the restructuring plan “continues to be impeded by a lack of low cost funding for this runoff entity [the non core part of Permo]. The authorities will follow up with further analysis of PTSB’s profitability prospects and funding options but it is necessary to implement a lasting solution for PTSB.”

The IMF's mission chief to Ireland Craig Beaumont stressed later that it's not the fund's view that Permo is "beyond hope". Rather, that it's taking too long to return to profitability.

In a statement issued to The Irish Times, Masding expressed hope that the decision on that restructuring plan would be made in the "coming months". He said the bank and the IMF were on the same page in terms of the timetable for its recovery.

Consensus in politics is rare in Ireland but Mr Noonan and his opposition counterparts in Fianna Fáil, Michael McGrath, and Sinn Féin, Pearse Doherty, were all of the view on Thursday that the survival of Permo was hugely important in the context of providing competition for consumers and making credit available.

It now remains to be seen if the IMF can bring some leverage to bear to find a solution to Permo’s legacy issue that might allow it return to profitability sooner than currently anticipated.

We would all welcome that.

Twitter's first flight may not be smooth
Excitement over the upcoming Twitter flotation is such that some investors mistook the worthless stock of former electronics retailer Tweeter for the social media firm this week, sending its shares up more than 1,000 per cent.

The real home of the 140 character message is valued at an estimated $10 billion, but the little blue bird revealed in papers filed with US regulators the firm that it made a loss of $69 million in the first six months of this year on revenues of $254 million. Many analysts are confident, however, that revenues are set to increase significantly as more advertising comes on stream.

About 85 per cent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising on the site. Its other revenue stream comes from selling its public data, known as “firehose”, which companies can use to analyse consumer trends and sentiment towards brands.

The tricky issue for Twitter is in how it increases its ad revenue while avoiding disruption to the user experience. Rivals can also undermine the business model by disabling integration with the social media site. In its filings the firm identifies this risk, giving the example of how after Facebook bought Instagram, its photo integration was disabled with Twitter. Instagram photos are no longer viewable within Tweets and users are redirected to Instagram to view photos through a link within a Tweet.

The other issue is scale. From egg to IPO, Twitter has recorded remarkable growth over just seven years. It has 218 million monthly active users. Yet Facebook had 800 million at the time of its IPO last year, and now tops 1 billion users. The Facebook comparison is relevant, for despite its remarkable growth and panegyric projections from some analysts at the time, the social media giant stumbled during its early days on the stock market. Even with all the hype surrounding this IPO, there is no guarantee that Twitter's first flight on the markets will be free of turbulence.

Investment figures far from direct
At first glance the statistics on foreign direct investment released yesterday by the Central Statistics Office appeared to be very much at odds with those released on Thursday by the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland.

The latter body stated that last year Ireland was the fourth largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world.

It got $22.8 billion (€16.8 billion), almost as much as all of developing Asia, and at a time when the amount of US FDI into the EU as a whole declined by 17.5 per cent.

The CSO report, on the other hand, showed direct investment flow into Ireland from the US last year of just €1.4 billion, well below the €20.8 billion that came from Europe.

However the likely reason for the difference between the two reports was quickly spotted. The chamber’s report identified investment into Ireland by US companies, whereas the CSO data identifies investment as coming from the country in which the entity making the investment is located. So if a US company invests in Ireland by way of a Dutch subsidiary, that appears in the CSO figures as an investment from the Netherlands, not the US.

This explains why, in the CSO figures, the biggest country investing into Ireland in 2012 was Luxembourg.

It also means that the CSO figures show exactly how Ireland has become embedded in a global flow of multinational capital, with the billions flowing into and out of Ireland painting a map in which such places as Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Bermuda and offshore centres generally, can loom larger than the US, Germany and Japan.

Investment flow from Bermuda, for example, switched from a disinvestment of €8 billion in 2011, to an investment of almost €3 billion in 2012.

A huge proportion of the money on the move is categorised as re-invested earnings, and some have speculated as to whether much of this should not be described as cash on deposit which US multinationals are seeking to protect from the IRS. Multinational investment in Ireland comprises a huge component of the economy’s productive activity. But is is not quite as big as the massive FDI figures might make it appear.