Given that Ireland already has a National Assets Management Agency and a National Pensions Reserve Fund the concept of building up national equity may not be quite so strange here, and may also be the more necessary as we don't have the Monetary flexibility to engage in our own QE.  I would be interested in your views as to how your concept of National Equity could be extended here, and how that would impact on national finances and governance.

It seems all the national narrative about, Nama in particular, is negative because of the excessive amount we are paying for very dubious assets.  However it seems to me that if a more positive (and realistic) treatment of national assets - public housing, transport infrastructure, electricity and broadband networks etc. - could be included in a national balance sheet, then the Neo-lib focus on reducing public expenditure would no longer be the only game in town.

The term "public expenditure" is almost synonymous with waste because we have no means of accounting for the productive assets thereby created - or differentiating between efficient and non-performing public assets or expenditure programmes.  PPP projects have been a disaster because, while the private operator is seen to make profits, there is no value put on the benefits (if any) that the public gets from their part of the investment - and thus no objective yardstick for evaluating the success or otherwise of specific projects from a public point of view.

I think we need to move beyond the Keynesian "public investment is good even if its only digging a hole and filling it in again" and the neo-lib "taxes are theft and public investment distorts the market" dichotomy and develop national accounting systems which can distinguish between good and better "investment opportunities" in public assets based on their contribution to the common good.

notes from no w here