I would still like to know which of our politicians (and members of their families) were given unsecured loans in the days and weeks leading up to the bank guarantee………. kind of the elephant in the room really. I suspect some of our political representatives did very well from the great book fiddling swindle.

With us of course paying for it.

And why tf are our politicians still being paid such obscene amounts of money?
Remind me again of Bertie’s annual pension?

Ridiculous carry on.

Lol four idiots so far and probably many more. Mostly politicians I assume aswell.

Bob,

We have not nationalised the banks. We have nationalised the debts of the banks which is a different thing entirely. A proper nationalisation of the banks would see them being run for the general good of society and not as the private profit gouging entities that they currently are.

Usual Socialist, drivel.
Had Capitalist rules been followed, the banks would have been let go under. They invest to make a profit, which they are entitled to keep. If they make losses, then they must suffer them, all of them. Secured or unsecured bondholders and shareholders should have been entitled to nothing.
We could not do that because we were running deficits in order to pay for the Socialist derived, fixed prices of the public sector which is far above what the free market is screaming.

Your ideology failed, it’s been in one or two text books and newspapers.

We were running deficits? Really? What planet were you living on?

Typical crazy talk from the looney capitalists and their enablers who destroyed the world economy. Find me a “free market”. Anywhere. At any time in history .

We had an inbuilt structural deficit that was waiting to blow up in our faces, which it duly did once the income from stamp duty vanished.

However, it wasn’t socialism (or capitalism) that was to blame for that – it was FFism.

On the contrary, it’s your capitalist ideology that has failed or rather it has never worked for bulk of the world’s population in the first place.
The FF/Green decision to socialize the banking debt had nothing to do with the budget deficit. Ireland was actually running a budget surplus in the years leading up to the bank guarantee. You might remember that as it was in one or two text books and newspapers .
Most countries run a budget deficit most of the time. The deficit only becomes a serious problem when you are unable to finance it as in Ireland’s case now. Ordinarily countries finance their deficits by borrowing the money in the market. Or if they control their own currency, they can create new money by buying their own government’s bonds etc (Quantitative easing as the Yanks call it). Even in the depths of the 1980s recession, Ireland was always able to go to the market to fund the budget deficit until Brian Lenihan bailed out the banks in 2008. The markets then realised Ireland would not be able to cover the massive banking losses and pay them back and so the interest rate they demanded rose to an unaffordable level. This pushed us into the tender Troika embrace who now lend us the money and charge interest so that we can pay the banking debt as well as our budget deficit.
The fundamental underlying reason that the markets can now dictate to Ireland is that when we joined the monetary union we relinquished the authority to create our own currency to the ECB and they have been acting contrary to Ireland’s national interests ever since. True sovereign nations like the U.S. or U.K. don’t have to borrow their own currency in the market, they can simply create it at will by pressing keys on a computer in their central banks. The markets understand this perfectly and so if these countries do choose to borrow in the market, the interest they will pay on sovereign debt is close to zero and always will be.

No, a blanket guarantee was the right decision.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/irelands-budget-deficit-trebles-26481715.html

Did you simply make a mistake or does the uncomfortable black hole in your philosophy cause you to ignore it. A bit like a pig on animal farm.
Before we, the taxpayer, bailed out the bank’s private losses, we were running deficits. A massive deficit that could no longer be shouldered by the private sector. Banks are about to go under, all of them. Financial collapse, like Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. Literally no money in the ATM’s.

A company that faces such losses, immediately cuts costs in order to avoid going out of business. This is how efficiency is determined. If you are running losses, you are inefficient and should be replaced, capital is entrusted to those who can make profits. The banks should have been allowed collapse with only the deposit holders(all of them) guaranteed by the government. The bondholders and shareholders get nothing as is the basis of capitalist risk. Moral hazard removes this.
A budget deficit means you are spending beyond your means. It means somebody else is financing it and if they believe you are no longer good for the money, they stop. Who exactly did you think was going to make up the deficit. Where do you think these magical pieces of paper, comes from, comrade. No one. How do we know this, because no one would lend us money. That’s why BIFFO had to go crawling to the ECB. How do you block this out?
We cut the deficit by inflicting on the vastly overpaid, public sector(excluding anyone on 35k or less and the frontline(nurses, gardai) the same pain felt by the hundreds of thousands that have been made redundant, forced to emigrate or had huge salary reductions.
No deficit, means no need to borrow. No property tax, no USC, no water charges, no increase in makey uppy tax like motor tax etc (hilarious that you are campaigning against these. Nobody does brass neck better than the far left)
We now present OUR terms to Merkel. A collective Eurobond to cover the market or the Irish punt gets printed. Why on earth did you think the wall street journal ran the headline:
“Ireland bails out Germany, again.
Ireland did not do this because Ireland had engaged in a ‘Social’ partnership with all powerful Unions, who care only about their members and not a jot about the unemployed, emigrated or elderly(latest attempt to take the travel pass from the elderly, to figuratively throw the elderly under the teflon bus driver’s bus)

Real world. Price for a product or service is determined by demand and supply. If I don’t value a product at the price being offered, I don’t pay for it. You cannot get around that. So, you ignore it.
Socialist system. We force the taxpayer to pay a price high above what the market demands. We exclude other, equally abled and qualified people for competing for a job at a lower price. In Private Enterprise, it would be called a cartel. Inefficient use of resources.
The value of a product or service is not how much work you have put into it, but how much value the consumer is willing to pay for it. Marx’s failed Labour theory of value, no matter how many times it has been discredited, even by left wing economists, still rears it’s head thanks to the useful idiots. I am better at producing something than you, I can produce the same thing in less time and at less cost(efficient use of resources, means I get rewarded by the customer.
I work twice as smart or harder than you, I get paid double as determined by a consumer of their own free will, again, not a monopoly.
Remove these and you have the Socialist paradise of of the USSR or Venezuela, Cuba(Dictatorships to most people, but workers Republics to the far left)
We must work harder for you, Coddler.

Some load of shite there kid. A bit like blaming a patient for the cost of their medical care because they went to the doctor to get cured. This had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with a drive to the bottom……..the bottom line, that is.

Brian just goes to show the level of thickooos that we have in this country .

Perhaps. It is however irrelevant to why we collapsed. The government bought all the sectoral interests it is true but the drivers of our complete collapse were the credit bubble and its associated property market.

We couldn’t pay for our state because our unemployment is a crisis, not stamp duty. Low consumer activity, low economic activity, high social welfare demands due to unemployment, fewer income tax payers. The notion that sacking a bunch of state employees and shrinking the economy, doing nothing to stimulate demand in the local economy and merely hoping the FDI sector would grow and save us is wishful thinking and has failed everywhere it became the orthodoxy.

Fantasists pretending that “proper” capitalism would have solved our problems

Sound just like people defending Stalinism as if it hadn’t been given a good try: proper communism doesn’t work like that. This is actually the way capitalism works: finance bubbles, collapses, cronies, plutocrats….

The fantasy of a free market is just that.

Yes, this crisis clearly showed the fatal flaws of capitalism which is why all the capitalism countries have now collapsed. Or not.

What is worse is the current government followed FF policy and has ensured we are ruined.

Never thought of it that way? good post

@caroline

Thanks, and as Ryan O above points out, Noonan and Burton, I do believe I read someplace that Noonan has his money in German banks… as my husband says, ‘follow the money’ you will find the bondholders, but we all can see that the main stream media in Ireland haven’t the balls to do a decent day’s investigative journalism and if they do, they are made redundant…

What choice did the current govt have? We don’t run our own affairs anymore whether we exit the bailout or not. In any case we elected the current crew knowing exactly what they were going to do.

So do tell what it was that influenced Lenihan to be won over.

If the bankruptcies of the banks would have caused a systemic problem, then the Euro authorities & ECB should have stepped in themselves & accepted the collective responsibility of the European financial system.

It was a finance bubble involving commercial lending, mostly to inflated values of commercial property. Household borrowing was not a significant factor in the banks’ insolvency.

There was & still is a systemic problem in the sheer size of the securitisation & financial derivatives gambling ‘markets’, compared to the real economy, which serve no purpose but ‘rent’ extraction. (The ‘useful’ ‘hedges’ are probably not even 1% of the extent of the total gambling.) The biggest problem being that institutions involved in this also operate the day to day payments & clearing system.

None of the deregulation which enabled this was an accident. With the collusion of their European counter parts, Wall St. insiders entered positions, or bought influence, in government, starting in the US, but using the WTO (World Trade Organisation) to entrench a ‘race to the bottom’ in governance in Europe & beyond.

The final steps to create the free-for-all in world banking were probably initiated by Robert Rubin & his protege Lawrence Summers, as detailed in ‘Economists and the Powerful’ by Norbert Haring & Niall Douglas. (But also assisted by all those going thru’ the revolving doors between Wall St. & Government office, including Tim Geithner, Bernanke, Greenspan & a host of others.)

Virtually none of the issues, fraud & criminality discussed in their book (and by others, notably former regulator, now Professor, William Black) have been addressed in the 5 years or so since the meltdown & public bailout.

Nor have the deep flaws of the Euro system been addressed or even much acknowledged.

Again, this is no accident. The reason is simple. For the top few percent, which covers elected & public service leaders as well as bankers & other owners of wealth, financial collapses followed by public bailout covering virtually every cent of ‘loss’ works fine for themselves. As does the ensuing period of recession & mass unemployment where wages are driven down & assets – public & private – are now available at firesale prices.

In short, the looting of the masses, directly & thru’ public funds, by the wealthy & political classes, continues in both the boom & bust phases more or less equally.

‘Democracy’ ultimately, has been corrupted by ensuring senior elected & public interest officials, of all kinds, all join the ranks of wealth, who make significant (if not the major part) of their income from ownership of money, rather than their labour.

We have not had ‘democracy’ that represents the interests of the majority at any time in decades at least, much anywhere.

“

Spot on Aaron. These were defunct business entities.

One further point of clarification regarding the rigged casino involving banks & financial derivatives – a ‘market’ that has grown to more than 10 times the size of total world economic production (GDP).

Besides the looting from public funds in bailouts, a major source of ‘marks’ or losing counter parties is the pension funds, private, & sometimes public. The ones handling the funds of the ordinary citizens of course. The top few percent make their own arrangements or are in receipt of guaranteed (by us!) benefit government schemes.

Matt Taibbi at the Rolling Stone writes about the looting of municipal schemes in the US, but the methods of skimming off & other losing positions are broadly similar anywhere.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926

If only the other 99.9% of the Irish could get their heads out of the ground and read the above.

the 2% are Fianna Failers and Greens.

Oh yeah… :-/

3% now, Niall :(

People that misread the question? :P

*hangs head in shame*

Lol Emilio :)

I’m actually more interested in the people who voted an unqualified No. What was Plan B? Yes, in principle you could have let the banks go bust. Depositors with up to €100k would have been covered under the general guarantee – which would have to come from somewhere – but would you have been ok with there being no banking system at all in the intervening period?

Good point, Emily. I would add, I would be interested in those who are giving an unqualified Yes.

3rd option was to set up a new bank and take the deposits of all the Irish banks and have the taxpayer guarantee those. This is all that is required to guarantee the financial system.
Capitalism’s rules, had they been followed would have seen the bondholders(both secure and unsecured) and shareholders of the banks lose everything(although they would be entitled to any recuperation of loans after the Taxpayers was compensated for the topping up of the missing deposits.

The Government failed to do this because
1)They failed to understand the situation.
2)They were/are running deficits in order to pay for the Public sector and all the state bodies. To make up the difference, we have to borrow on the open market. After defaulting, the Government would have found it hard to raise capital hence the need to crawl to the ECB.
3) They did not have the courage to stare down the Unions and make the necessary cuts.
4)They failed to understand that the Germans, British etc had vast liabilities in our banks and would face ruin themselves if our banks went under. It should of been us, dictating terms to the Germans.

Big Pat is paying for us all, party!

Well said Jim.