Thursday, May 24th 2012
So what is the purpose of NAMA, or indeed the other idea for resolving the current banking crisis, the temporary nationalisation of Irish banks? With all the debate about the details of NAMA, whether it leads to the tax payer or the shareholder getting burned, what value will be set for the assets used as [...]
John Maynard Keynes once remarked that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Are we approaching a time when practical men (and women) will have to make a conscious choice between the philosophies of two long-dead economists: Keynes himself and Karl [...]
When middle-of-the-road commentators are beginning to sound like blood-thirsty Jacobins, you know something extraordinary is going on. The global financial crisis has driven the implacably centrist Simon Jenkins of the Guardian to pen articles like this:
“If the mistakes that have collapsed the world’s financial markets had been made by statesmen and had led to war, [...]
Towards the end of Tuesday night’s edition of TV3 current affairs programme ‘Nightly News with Vincent Browne’ the host asked one of his guests, almost rhetorically, whether the media have some responsibility for the artificial inflation of property prices in their promotion of the market through property supplements and advertising. His guest agreed that to [...]
“If you owe us £1,000, it’s your problem; if you owe us £1 million, it’s our problem” was how Justice Moriarty described the AIB’s attitude towards lending when he was chairing the tribunal investigating Charlie Haughey’s adventures with AIB.
How right he was. While we read the good news about the American government’s using [...]
