The Euro has got to go. It cannot and will not work. As long as it lasts it’ll be a case of lurching from one crisis to the next.
And any solution which involves propping up Anglo-Irish, AIB and BOI won’t work either.
I don’t agree with you sid we would be really fucked altogether if the we left the euro now not that we aren’t fucked at the moment but the country could well collapse if we left the euro and I know you will argue that we wouldn’t be in the state we are had we not joined the euro but ‘‘we are where we are’’ and we just need a bailout and it’s better form than the IMF
No country will leave the Euro out of choice more than likely and certainly not Ireland but I think some event will happen at some stage which blows the whole thing apart.
I mean what happens if Spain needs a bailout? What happens if Italy needs a bailout? I don’t think the Euro could survive that. I don’t know how exactly the Euro would be dismantled, but I think they will have to find a mechanism of doing it at some stage.
Dick Roche is a prize ape.
Any chance we could have a royal wedding here to distract Johnny Paycheck from the horrors about to befall us. Does Bertie have any more daughters?
BBC newsnight reporting that the Brits are going to have to bail us out
Dick Roche on BBC newsnight now. Ffs. We are fucked if this is the best we can do.
Mother of God, think I’m glad I missed him on Newsnight. That fellow is as thick as they come.
Dick Roche making an utter cunt of himself on BBC Newsnight. Thanks Dick
is he the iodine tablets guy?
He sure is.
We made him Minister for Europe ages ago when that was an unimportant role. Then he got to be the government’s “expert” on Brussels which meant he presided over two shite European treaty campaigns. He has a fondness for going on tv which is understandable from a politician but I can’t understand how the powers that be in FF let him on tv or radio. He’s a thorough disaster.
He must have been eating the fucking things. Imagine putting this cunt out to bat for Ireland.
Excellent blog from Paul Mason (Newsnight) at the BBC. Latest post:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/
[indent]Eurocrisis: can E80bn bailout restore calm?
I’m in Brussels at the Ecofin meeting. Here’s a few thoughts about what’s being briefed to the press and what I think it means.
There are clearly talks going on to stage a bailout of Ireland, rumoured to be around 80bn. Ireland wants this to be a complex mixture of sovereign debt bailout and banking bailout.
But I’ve just spoken to the Dutch finmin, Jan Kees de Jager who was insisting that, if Ireland asked for an EU/IMF bailout, Dutch voters would only support it if there were strict rules attached. He listed them and I interrupted: “It’s that or nothing?” “That or nothing,” he replied.
And that’s the problem. Ireland doesn’t want an EU bailout because it knows it’s going to get the scale and timing of its national budget taken over by the EU. Despite that I expect maybe in the next two hours the basics of a deal to be hammered out.
But here’s the problem: here, amid the bureaucratic steel and glass of the EU quarter, is the bit they can control. The horsetrading between countries.
Out there, there is the uncontrollable bit - and that’s the bond market. It was the bond market that staged a run on south European debt in May; and which has staged one on Ireland’s debt this week. The reason is always the same - the fear that they are about to lose some of their money.
Europe’s leaders have bent over backwards to avoid investors losing money; they have inflicted pain on taxpayers and service users, and humiliation on national governments in order to stave off the idea of investors losing money.
But everybody knows this is going to happen. That’s why a resolution of the Irish crisis needs to happen. As one bondmarket participant told me:
“No-one in the markets thinks that a new treaty is a goer, with the ink not yet dry on Lisbon and a growing number of malcontents in the Eurozone making the possibility of such a thing passing in the next few years appear dim.”
Absent a new Treaty, the bond markets know the Eurozone authorities are going to get pushed from pillar to post as they try to defend one bad debt casualty after another.
Incidentally I don’t think this is “speculation”: though there are speculators in the sovereign debt market, the market’s violent reactions seem to be driven by non-speculative investors suddenly realising how poor their understanding of sovereign risk is. They realise they are actually going to lose money: but they are frantically trying to project incremental judgments and valuations into a space that has become (a) black and white and (B) where there is no real market, only political decisions.
Ireland matters because, (i) once it is sorted, attention turns to Portugal - the last of the small, saveable countries. After that, Spain - and there are even murmurings about France. Never mind if these are rational: once the murmurings start in the bondmarket it’s a case of “all that is real is rational” - you just have to deal with it.
(ii) The stress tests for the European banks were organised to exclude the possibility of sovereign debt default - or a controlled default known as restructuring. But as one bond source told me: that went out of the window when Merkel started talking about imposing restructuring - ie losses on investors - through a new version of the Lisbon treaty.
A third issue is the perceived failure of the Irish anti-crisis strategy: swift bank bailouts in 2008; swift austerity in 2009. This was the model others were urged to emulate, especially because Ireland had not cooked the books like Greece. With the rest of the world (except America and China) now looking at some form of turn to austerity, they will look at the plight of the Fianna Fail government and mutter: this is how they were treated, what happens to us?
Whatever happens tonight the fundamental crisis of the Eurozone is not solved. Only today Austria is reported to have suspended its bailout payment to Greece because it alleged Greece had not met the stringent conditions - which takes me back to the Dutch finmin and my previous blogs: it’s about north Europe imposing fiscal controls on Ireland and southern Europe.
And it’s not over.[/indent]
Excellent blog alright.
Irish Times now saying EU and IMF are preparing groundwork for Irish bailout. Cowen is probably delighted, saves him the hassle of filling a load of IMF application forms and getting proof of address, references from work etc.
They really really really want us to take the cash don’t they.
We don’t have to imagine it at all what does the average British punter watching that think of us after that
Our greed got us into this mess and our greed will get us out of it.
The EU/IMF are like the drug dealers hanging around the treatment centers on Merchant Quay.
They know we are trying to kick the habit of big borrowing, but they also know we want the money so bad, and by giving us the money we either kill ourselves or else they make a tidy profit.
There must be a way where we could withdraw at some stage and peg a new punt to say the Argentinean peso or alternatively, sterling, for say five years.
Brian Lenihan (who I have defended in the past) has come out with a beaut this morning:
“When you borrow, you lose a little bit of your sovereignty, no matter who you borrow from.”