In the larger sense, German banks dug their own grave by financing shaky foreign deals they wouldn’t have been allowed to close at home. Now that their risky loans have gone bad, these same banks are using the ECB to twist arms to make them good… no matter the cost to the other EU states. 

Privatize the profits, socialize the loses: it’s not just for the United States, any longer.

Now let’s be clear, Ireland before hand had already assumed the liabilities of the banks and this propelled Ireland out of the bond markets. Who insisted that Ireland insure no bank should fail? Brian Lenihan, the former minister for finance intimated in the documentary Freefall, that the call came for the ECB, as to have let a bank such as Anglo go would have tipped mainland finical institutions into turmoil.

So Ireland took the hit for the lousy investment decisions of these institutions and now we are being bled. If we hadn’t have assumed the liabilities of the banks we could have stayed in the markets and there would have been no need for a ‘bailout’.

It’s not like that at all.  It’s much closer to wearing a dynamite vest.  If Ireland explodes the entire EU will go down, so there is a credible threat.  In any case, they’re going to gut the Irish tax-payer regardless, so it’s more like threatening to blow the whole EU if they don’t take the gun away from our heads.

As for “wrong economic model” I don’t see where that enters into it at all.  They have an economic model where the rich win and everyone else loses.  It’s a model fit for purpose, it’s just not fit for the purpose of the majority of us.

That whirring sound? Michael Collins.

“Is it because we attract more business in to our state every year?” — Moving jobs from one part of the US to another is not creating jobs. Not caring for your poor means the rest of us have to pick up the tab. Red states are run in an authoritarian manner which is why in some there is no longer even any democratic opposition. In some red states entire towns have had their elected officials dismissed and the GOP has installed unelected corporate czars to rule over them as a dictator. I call that predatory.

“The entire thing can be carefully reflated if they so desire.” I’d be in favor of that but one problem is that people are woefully misinformed about basic economics and you can’t make the right choices if you have the wrong economic model.

stephen rice, what u said made me realise that maybe the ecb official was being very tactful and not said what i suggested he might say. haha. it wont do for him to rub irish nose in it, when he was there to butter them up. better to let them all go home thinking they have scored points over him.

Ireland should use it’s position to threaten a collapse of the entire EU unless the bond holders are completely wiped out.  This need not be a threat of the financial system as everyone is owing everyone else in the EU.  The entire thing can be carefully reflated if they so desire.  The problem is that this means eliminating the enormous wealth of gamblers.  Something they are quite unwilling to do.  Therefore they must be forced to do it properly, or it will not happen.

Margarete Thatcher is famous for saying “there is no such thing as society”. Which is of course wrong. Which is why you can’t let the banks fail. Because there really is a society and if they fell it really would bring down everything else.

The reason the 1% want you to pay for their casino market is because you let them. Not only do you let them, you BEG them to “please please please take all my money because some day I could be rich like you”. I mean, you don’t really think *they* believe in the nonsense on stilts that passes for conservative economics do you? 

And as long as people will come out in the thousands to protest “Keep yer gubbment hands offa mah Medicare!” the 1% will keep doing what they’ve always done. Why wouldn’t they?

So what is needed is mo better financial union, not less.

However it’s a bit beside the point, which is that they shouldn’t have to accept responsibility for the actions of merchant banks which had absolutely nothing to do with them, which is where the bulk of the problem lies.

*(except for the bit about supporting corporation tax avoidance and depriving the government of revenue – it was actually a sensible government strategy to attract foreign investment and boost employment, from which both the companies and the country have reaped great benefit. Everyone’s happy – oh yeah, except the other european countries who followed a different  tax strategy and are disgruntled at our perceived unfair advantage, even though there was nothing to stop them implementing similar strategies themselves.)

What’s *actually* wrong, is that the system was allowed to come to this pass, and that it hasn’t been meaningfully reformed so that it won’t happen again. That’s what the journalist should be hammering on, not the mundane details of patching things back to the way they were.

But lots of French and German banks had speculated on the markets and invested money in these institutions, so letting them collapse would in turn cause a chain reaction of liquidity crisis in some European banks. Therefore, to save the continental banks, Europe made our government take on this private corporate bank debt as public/national taxpayer debt.   We had to give an unlimited guarantee on all the unsecured bonds belonging to the banks.  We were forced by Europe to take on billions of euro in private, corporate debt as part of our national debt. The loans we are getting are because taking on the private bank debt has increased our national government debt to the point that nobody wanted to lend to us as a country. We’re bailing out European banks, yet it’s sold as Europe bailing out Ireland.  The ECB is lending to us so we can pay the formerly private, non-state-affiliated debt to the would-have-collapsed-private Irish banks to pay back to their European investors, the investment banks who bought bonds on the open market knowing full well the risks of their exposure. Ridiculous is not the word.   

its a shame this isn’t more common amoung journalists – they used to atleast try and ensure the world’s honesty…