"I love the way that the WSJ today covers the collapse of Ireland’s banking system, and with it the country’s fiscal leadership. There’s little if any actual news here, but that’s a feature, not a bug: it frees up the WSJ’s writers and editors to present the big-picture narrative in as clear and compelling a manner as possible, without having to overemphasize some small factoid which they happen to be breaking.

The story reads like one of those epic lyric tragedies of old, where no one ever learns from their mistakes, and errors simply compound endlessly. First, the Irish government, convinced that the country’s banks were suffering from a liquidity crisis rather than a banking crisis, decided to solve that problem in the way that only a government can — with a blanket guarantee of substantially all of the banks’ liabilities.

But of course the banks were fundamentally insolvent, and so began a series of cash drains on the government, each one meant to be the last and final. First there was €1.5 billion for Anglo, and €2 billion each for Bank of Ireland (IRE) and Allied Irish (AIB). Then there was another €7 billion for Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland. Then Anglo’s losses reached €20 billion, with another €48 billion “at risk” of default. And where are we now?"


cont'd


http://seekingalpha.com/article/236120-learning-from-ireland...