[Sixstrings]

DUBLIN – Ireland unveiled the harshest budget measures in its history Wednesday, a four-year plan to slash deficits by euro15 billion ($20 billion) so it can receive a massive bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

The austerity plan axes thousands of state jobs, trims welfare benefits and pensions, and imposes new taxes on property and water. In all, it seeks to cut euro10 billion ($13.3 billion) from spending and raise euro5 billion ($6.7 billion) in extra taxes from 2011 to 2014.

Even Prime Minister Brian Cowen conceded the plan would hurt the living standard of everyone in the nation.

Yet analysts still expressed doubts that the EU-IMF rescue loan, which Cowen said would be about euro85 billion ($115 billion), would be big enough to save Ireland from an eventual default.

And bank shares plummeted for a third straight day on the Irish Stock Exchange, reflecting growing expectations that investors will be wiped out if the government is forced to seize majority control of the country's two dominant banks, Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland.
"The government is completely in denial about the amount of money they'll have to borrow," said Constantin Gurdgiev, a finance lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and an economics adviser to IBM in Europe.

(snip)

"This is a road map back to the Stone Age," said Jack O'Connor, president of Ireland's largest union, SIPTU.
He noted that Ireland had already suffered nearly euro15 billion in cuts and tax hikes since 2008, gutting economic growth and helping to double unemployment to 13.6 percent.

"Ireland needs a strategy for growth, but this plan will achieve the opposite," said O'Connor, who plans to lead a Dublin protest march on Saturday against the cuts.

(snip)

Left untouched, to the irritation of other EU nations, is Ireland's exceptionally low 12.5 percent tax rate on business profits. That rate is less than half the EU average and has helped to lure about 1,000 high-tech multinationals to Ireland, far more proportionally than any other European country.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101124/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_ireland_financial_crisis

What a mess.. seems like every bailout and round of austerity is bigger than the last one. Old folks are getting their pensions cut, there's going to be a tax on WATER, and yet corp taxes will remain among the lowest in the world.

And even after all that, the "experts" still say Ireland will have to eventually default.

[Cog]

From the article:

"The end game is simple," McWilliams said. "Either we take the pain and the economy is crushed, as the government insists, or the people who lent the money ... take the pain, as they should, and the economy can breathe."

But Britain and Germany both have exposures to Irish banks exceeding $200 billion each, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Governments across the 16-nation eurozone warn that allowing Irish loans to default would send shockwaves through Europe's interdependent banking system.

So crush Ireland or have Germany and Britain take a $400 billion dollar haircut. Hmm... I think I know what the Eurozone will do on this one. Add in some peak oil shortages worldwide and we will really start to see some fun and games. All of this borrowing and spending money and relying on unlimited growth to pay it all off is coming to an end. The math is relentless on this one.

[Novus]

From the article:


So crush Ireland or have Germany and Britain take a $400 billion dollar haircut. Hmm... I think I know what the Eurozone will do on this one. Add in some peak oil shortages worldwide and we will really start to see some fun and games. All of this borrowing and spending money and relying on unlimited growth to pay it all off is coming to an end. The math is relentless on this one.

It is actually the private banks that should be taking the hair cut. There is no need for Ireland to bail out failed private enterprise. What ever happened to fiscal responsibility. And anyone notice not one crook is going to jail for this.

[vtsnowedin]

[And anyone notice not one crook is going to jail for this.

I have not been fallowing this Irish crisis so please enlighten me. What crook committed what crime?

[diemos]

It is actually the private banks that should be taking the hair cut.

And that's the problem with fractional reserve lending. The banks didn't lend out their own money and they don't have enough capital to make good on the losses. Making the private banks take the haircut means making their depositors take the haircut.

Once a bunch of people have their bank account go up in smoke the rest will immediately try to withdraw all their funds from their bank and ... poof! ... there goes the financial system and western civilization.

Banks require regulation to prevent them taking on excessive risks and to maintain adequate capital ratios.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Once a bunch of people have their bank account go up in smoke the rest will immediately try to withdraw all their funds from their bank and ... poof! ... there goes the financial system and western civilization.

If anything from this so-called "civilization" is to prevail we must allow banking collapse and fast.
Dillydallying here will only extend current phase of burnout and rapidly reduce any chances of stabilizing and saving features which are still salvageable.

We are approaching an *event horizon* but it doesn't seem that there is much concern here.
Instead we are delighted to observe fantastic illusions unfolding in vicinity of horizon, we are getting excited about blue shifts (however lucky few can see us more and more redshifted) and we are only eager to see how this damn *trapped surface* might look like.

[americandream]

What a mess.. seems like every bailout and round of austerity is bigger than the last one. Old folks are getting their pensions cut, there's going to be a tax on WATER, and yet corp taxes will remain among the lowest in the world.

And even after all that, the "experts" still say Ireland will have to eventually default.

Defaults will increasingly become a fact of life as debt is resorted to in a bid to prop up consumption.

In 5 years or so, extreme volatility will have become a feature of markets as speculation replaces traditional investing and market performance in the West is determined by how successfully Western economies steer their way around the increasingly unstable debt/default playoff.

Asian and third world growth generally, will cushion the terminal effects of this mix in terms of the survival of Western democracies UNTIL the Asians themselves (Japan is already in the doldrums) succumb to this post surplus syndrome.

After that, it's anyone's guess what will unfold. Probably a total failure of globalism and wars as capitalists turn on each other in a bid to secure what little surplus is available. You will see blood flow then.

[EnergyUnlimited]

In 5 years or so, extreme volatility will have become a feature of markets as speculation replaces traditional investing and market performance in the West is determined by how successfully Western economies steer their way around the increasingly unstable debt/default playoff.

Asian and third world growth generally, will cushion the terminal effects of this mix in terms of the survival of Western democracies UNTIL the Asians themselves (Japan is already in the doldrums) succumb to this post surplus syndrome.

After that, it's anyone's guess what will unfold. Probably a total failure of globalism and wars as capitalists turn on each other in a bid to secure what little surplus is available. You will see blood flow then.

I observe that you are trimming a timescale left for functioning of existing system.
Not so long ago you were expecting globalization and capitalist system to run for next 30-40 years before the crunch.
Now you are expecting system to unravel within few years only.
What are the reasons?

[diemos]

If anything from this so-called "civilization" is to prevail we must allow banking collapse and fast.

Heh. It's hard to decide what I like most about our so-called "civilization". Indoor plumbing, medical care, abundant food, internet, leisure. I'm sure I'll miss them all when they're gone.

What has civilization ever done for us? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso

At the moment the financial system is intertwined with the real productive economy. If you're going to advocate a fast crash to the financial system you'd better have a plan in place to replace it's function in the real economy pronto or you can have a depression where real resource lay idle while people starve.

[americandream]

In 5 years or so, extreme volatility will have become a feature of markets as speculation replaces traditional investing and market performance in the West is determined by how successfully Western economies steer their way around the increasingly unstable debt/default playoff.

Asian and third world growth generally, will cushion the terminal effects of this mix in terms of the survival of Western democracies UNTIL the Asians themselves (Japan is already in the doldrums) succumb to this post surplus syndrome.

After that, it's anyone's guess what will unfold. Probably a total failure of globalism and wars as capitalists turn on each other in a bid to secure what little surplus is available. You will see blood flow then.

I observe that you are trimming a timescale left for functioning of existing system.
Not so long ago you were expecting globalization and capitalist system to run for next 30-40 years before the crunch.
Now you are expecting system to unravel within few years only.
What are the reasons?

You need to read what I write, CAREFULLY. My point, and I will repeat myself, is that capitalism is due to transition from being investor centric, to speculator centric, in 5 years or therabouts, with the process of capitalism's unravelling merely encountering the next landmark on the road to surplus exhaustion.

One would have imagined that this would have been evident given my subsequent comment (any other interpretation would render the entire post, absurd):

"Asian and third world growth generally, will cushion the terminal effects of this mix in terms of the survival of Western democracies....."

Read carefully. One may learn a thing or two

[Novus]

And anyone notice not one crook is going to jail for this.

I have not been fallowing this Irish crisis so please enlighten me. What crook committed what crime?

What kind of logic is that: No investigation = no crime committed? Get a clue these bankers don't have a leg to stand on.

It is actually the private banks that should be taking the hair cut.

And that's the problem with fractional reserve lending. The banks didn't lend out their own money and they don't have enough capital to make good on the losses. Making the private banks take the haircut means making their depositors take the haircut.

Once a bunch of people have their bank account go up in smoke the rest will immediately try to withdraw all their funds from their bank and ... poof! ... there goes the financial system and western civilization.

Banks require regulation to prevent them taking on excessive risks and to maintain adequate capital ratios.

Putting the day of reckoning off only makes the fall that much harder. Fractional Reserve banking was a scam from the get go that never should have seen the light of day if the market regulators were really paying attention. This voodoo economic system based on infinite growth in a world of scarcity must come to an end. Only a scam artist banker can turn $10 into a million dollars straight out of thin air. Fractional Reserve banking has created an economy based on hallucinated wealth. The total debt the banks have created is a hundred times the global GDP. The worlds governments can not possibly back up and bail out the hallucinated wealth of the bankers. The end of this financial system need not be the end of Western Civilization. It will only be the death of Western Civilization if the governments try to catch the falling knife of this great unwinding.

[vtsnowedin]

And anyone notice not one crook is going to jail for this.

I have not been fallowing this Irish crisis so please enlighten me. What crook committed what crime?

What kind of logic is that: No investigation = no crime committed? Get a clue these bankers don't have a leg to stand on.

That was a question not a statement or position. Care to answer it?
It is not clear to me that anyone has committed any crime. Merely having a very bad outcome dose not by itself make it a crime and you can't make a practise that has turned out to be bad illegal after the fact. So can you name someone that you know did something that was against the law at the time he or she did it that caused this mess?

[dolanbaker]

That was a question not a statement or position. Care to answer it?
It is not clear to me that anyone has committed any crime. Merely having a very bad outcome dose not by itself make it a crime and you can't make a practise that has turned out to be bad illegal after the fact. So can you name someone that you know did something that was against the law at the time he or she did it that caused this mess?

The CEO of Anglo Irish Bank is a prime suspect, among many others who treated the bank as their own personal "ATM" using the money to speculate on many of the recent property disasters in Ireland.

Multinational businesses who used Ireland as a tax dodge by having their headquarters here, Foreign banks and speculators making a fast buck and of course a significant number within Ireland who flipped houses and land on borrowed money thus driving prices so high that many of the last buyers ended up with unserviceable debts.

[Cog]

Flipping houses is not a crime and neither is speculation. It rises to the level of stupidity but not criminality. If multi-national buisnesses want to take advantage of Ireland's lower corporate tax rate, that is perfectly legal.

So where is the crime again?

[TreeFarmer]

Here is an execllent article that really sums up what has, is, and could be happening with Ireland.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

[dolanbaker]

The golden circle of crooks, who helped break the bank!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 781014.ece

Named: four of Anglo’s ‘golden circle’
Gerry Gannon, Joe O’Reilly, Seamus Ross and Jerry Conlan are four of the businessmen who secretly bought 10% of Anglo Irish Bank with the bank’s own cash

[Blacksmith]

Here is an execllent article that really sums up what has, is, and could be happening with Ireland.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

Excellent article. Just shows how important it is to know you politicians. When I worked in Northern Quebec some 40 years ago I was surprised to find out how well these "backwoodsmen" knew their politicians.

Unfortunately, when we vote in Canada we vote for a party rather than the woman or man, and if they go against the party funding is cut off and they might be expelled.

[Cog]

Are any of these businessmen under arrest or under indictment?

[Sixstrings]

Today the myth of a popular, democratic government in Ireland collapsed for good. After an impromptu poll of 500 people nationwide found that a "substantial majority" of the people, or 57%, wants the State to default on debts to bondholder, what it ended up getting was precisely the opposite. Why? "Last night that the Irish delegation negotiating with the EU-IMF last week raised the issue of default. "The Europeans went completely mad," a senior government source said." Of course, this is a reason for the Europeans not to want an Irish default, not for the Irish. And last time we checked, the Irish government represented its people, not the interests of Brussels.

As America showed all too well, we expect every banker in the world to threaten perpetual damnation for Ireland should they decide on doing what is right for its people (and so very wrong for another year of record banker bonuses). Then again, with elections in Ireland imminent, it is almost certain that there will be a massive popular overhaul of the government, and all bets at that point will be off whether the ECB can dictate terms to a brand new, and far more loyal, government.

To quote to Independent: "In Dublin, there is barely concealed outrage at the interventions of Ms Merkel and at the position adopted recently by the European Central Bank, which precipitated the arrival of the EU-IMF team in Ireland."The ECB f**ked us," one government official in Dublin was reported yesterday to have said." We wonder how soon before rhetoric finally shifts to action.

(snip)

At this point what happens in Ireland in the grand scheme of things doesn't matter. Tomorrow all eyes will be on Portuguese bond spreads, Tuesday Spain, and Wednesday on Belgium and Italy.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/europe-goes-completely-mad-suggestion-irish-default-demanded-57-irish-population

Is Ireland even a democratic republic anymore, or rather an IMF dictatorship?

Don't have a link handy, but I read somewhere that the European Central Bank wants Ireland to delay elections until all the bailout stuff is finalized. From everything I've read, seems like the whole EU has been built on sidestepping and blocking democracy. That's not a union, that's a Supreme Soviet -- a tyranny of unelected bureaucrats.

[Madpaddy]

From government website. "To the end of 2008 Ireland has received approximately €17 billion in Structural & Cohesion Funds support since joining the E.U. in 1973." Thats about what we are giving to the bailout from the Pension Reserve Fund and is only 3 years interest payments on the bailout. Why not give back the €17 billion, tell EU to Fxxk off, reduce corporation tax to 2% and get all the multinationals not already headquartered here to do so.