Sunday 30 June 2013

Irish banks abusing state guarantee

Bank bailouts are a terrible moral hazard: "Heads I win, Tail you lose".

In Ireland the economy is doing really badly, partly by the 2008/2009 crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts, to be paid by the taxpayers. Details are emerging that are not exactly pretty, from an article of The Irish Times:





David Drumm, former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, laughed at the prospect of abusing the State guarantee, the latest revelations from tapes reveal.
 
We won’t do anything blatant, but . . . we have to get the money in . . . get the f***in’ money in, get it in,” he tells a senior manager at the bank, John Bowe.
In another recording, Mr Bowe and another senior executive at the bank, Peter Fitzgerald, are heard laughing about the prospects of nationalisation. They see it as “fantastic” and are delighted at the prospect of becoming civil servants.


The victims? The ordinary people, as usual:


Mr Gilmore said that the decision cost the Irish people billions of euro. “I think we need to get to the bottom of how the decisions were made and what was behind them.”


I often complain about the slow enforcement in Malaysia, but Ireland is also not exactly quick in taking actions either.


The chairman of the Oireachtas Finance Committee Ciaran Lynch said the latest disclosures were proof-positive that an inquiry into the banking collapse was urgently required.


Urgently? After five whole years?

Even Warren Buffett invested in two Irish banks just before the crisis, although not in the Anglo Irish Bank. He is, apparently, human after all. The good thing is, he did acknowledge his mistake.

For more background on the Irish crisis, a long but very interesting article by Michael Lewis: "When Irish Eyes Are Crying"

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