Every Little Helps
Two weeks ago Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) announced the rarest kind of accounting mistake. As a consequence of some double counting of liabilities within the Housing Finance Agency the Irish government established that it was 3.6bn Euros better off than it previously believed that it was. Following the discovery of the error, Ireland’s gross outstanding debt for 2010 was revised to €144.4 billion (92.6% of GDP) rather than the published €148 billion (94.9% of GDP). A nice windfall, certainly, but…