Irish Times

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

But is Greece being punished? Greece is in this trouble because they constructed a bullshit clientelist economy that was reliant on secret borrowing to function, and when that bubble burst they had nothing to fall back on.

Yes, they are being punished.

Badly run countries go bankrupt all the time. But they usually only have to deal with the banks and the IMF. And banks, being businesses, try to minimise their losses. But Greece is not dealing with banks and the IMF, Greece is dealing with its European 'partners'.

Schäuble crushing the Greek economy means that the European partners will get less money back than if they just listen to the IMF. But Schäuble doesn't care. He will gladly pay good money to see Greece punished. Everyone in the IMF is like totally, "WTF, man", about the whole thing.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

The Canadian ambassador, Kevin Vickers, who foiled an attack on the Ottawa parliament, rugby-tackled a protester at a ceremony for the British dead of 1916.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

In more serious news, a Sinn Féin TD has revealed further garda malpractice allegations in Leitrim - rather embarrassing for FF, after Martin had given the Garda Commissioner a vote of confidence!

[Lang Spoon]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Enough with the Greeks deserve it thing. The people who truly fucked their country still have their pads in NYC and Belgravia, and their Swiss accounts. What exactly would be a level of spending Greece can afford? Maybe a Pinochet style privatized pension system, healthcare where they'll want your bank card before an emergency op?

Economics is not a moral science. Debt (even bankruptcy) is not the end of the world for a country with a Central Bank worth the name. And who gives a fuck if debt means guilt in German? Fuck the fuck off and begin fiscal transfers from a Euro Finance Ministry or fuck the fuck off and dismantle this ridiculous currency. People are being killed so Greece learn their lesson.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Lang Spoon wrote: Enough with the Greeks deserve it thing. The people who truly fucked their country still have their pads in NYC and Belgravia, and their Swiss accounts. What exactly would be a level of spending Greece can afford? Maybe a Pinochet style privatized pension system, healthcare where they'll want your bank card before an emergency op?

Economics is not a moral science. Debt (even bankruptcy) is not the end of the world for a country with a Central Bank worth the name. And who gives a fuck if debt means guilt in German? Fuck the fuck off and begin fiscal transfers from a Euro Finance Ministry or fuck the fuck off and dismantle this ridiculous currency. People are being killed so Greece learn their lesson.

You don't have to think Greece "deserved it", as you put it. You just have to understand how badly the whole economy was structured and how little effort its governments had made to get out of the shit it was heading for. See Michael Lewis for instance:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010

or OECD stuff about Greece. It's poor performance everywhere I've looked.

It's why Greece is seen as it is.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

This doesn't scream unsustainable bubble economy at me.

Irish seasonally adjusted trade surplus increased by 12 percent to €4,106 million in March of 2016, compared to a downwardly revised €3,667 million surplus in the previous month, as exports fell 2 percent while imports dropped at a much faster 12 percent. Meanwhile, the non-seasonally adjusted value of exports went down 1 percent year-on-year, led by lower sales of medical and pharmaceutical products while imports dropped sharply by 19 percent, as purchases of organic chemicals declined by the most. Balance of Trade in Ireland averaged 1167191.13 EUR Thousand from 1970 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 4796000 EUR Thousand in January of 2016 and a record low of -294081 EUR Thousand in July of 1981. Balance of Trade in Ireland is reported by the Central Statistics Office Ireland.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Nor does this.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/housing-index

Peak residential property index- 130
Latest figure- 87

[Lang Spoon]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Of course Greece was a terrible economy, but what good is continuing to rape a comatose wreck going to achieve? It's the continuing medicine to satisfy the smug burghers of Mittleuropa that grates me.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Good nugget from that Michael Lewis piece.

Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Lang Spoon wrote: Of course Greece was a terrible economy, but what good is continuing to rape a comatose wreck going to achieve? It's the continuing medicine to satisfy the smug burgher of Mittleuropa that grates me.

The argument that you should pay people to dig holes and fill them in again in a slump makes good sense to me, but it might make less sense to creditors. That must be how Greek public administration looks.

But you can't take that amount of money out of an economy. The Eurogroup ought to have got more money in- maybe by building infrastructure themselves and keeping some type of ownership of it.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

The independent Policing Authority gives the Garda Commissioner a haymaker.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Tubby Isaacs wrote: Good nugget from that Michael Lewis piece.

Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

That's a bit of straw man journalism there, because I don't think anybody is claiming that the banks sunk Greece.

And if you say that Greece got into trouble thanks to corrupt politicians engaging in a reckless borrowing binge then the first person to agree with you would be Yannis Varoufakis.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Tubby Isaacs wrote:

Of course Greece was a terrible economy, but what good is continuing to rape a comatose wreck going to achieve? It's the continuing medicine to satisfy the smug burgher of Mittleuropa that grates me.

The argument that you should pay people to dig holes and fill them in again in a slump makes good sense to me, but it might make less sense to creditors. That must be how Greek public administration looks.

But you can't take that amount of money out of an economy. The Eurogroup ought to have got more money in- maybe by building infrastructure themselves and keeping some type of ownership of it.

But the Eurogroup are not acting like creditors, because everything they have done so far has decreased Greece's ability to service its debt.

So either the Eurogroup are incredibly incompetent or they are up to something else besides trying to minimise their losses as creditors.

[Lang Spoon]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Politics, innit. Yer average fabled Swabian Hausfrau let alone the Slovaks/Baltics etc who have destroyed their public sector to join the great Euro project, they will eviscerate any party that agrees to reason being applied. Greece will die, but it's their fault for not reforming fast enough. Aye right.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Borracho wrote: Berbaslug, are you familiar with the expression "Don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining?" Because it flashes through my mind every time I read one of these posts by you informing us that everything is fine, the country is in wonderful shape and the FG/Labour coalition have done an absolutely spiffing job.

It's unfortunate that that's what you take from those posts. I'd prefer if you took the message that everything isn't shit. By any conventional method of measurement, Ireland's economic progress over the last five years has been extraordinary.

We regained control of our finances so we can afford the services we now provide. Our economy is growing at a frankly absurd rate, that is translating into rapid job growth. Net outward migration has ended, unemployment has continuously fallen, wages have started to rise in the private sector. They will start to rise steadily in the public sector over the next couple of years. Disposable income rocketed last year.

Looking back over irish economic history, the only comparable time is between 1995-2001. These are facts Please accept this. This is true.

If you were to tell anyone in 2011 that things would work out the way they did, they simply wouldn't believe you. It's that implausibly good.

At this point you have to consider that the job facing the irish state was to repair the mess after a bubble economy. That has left us with a number of interlocking problems. Many of them which couldn't properly be dealt with until the economy started to grow, and we had regained Control over our finances.

We've a housing crisis in part because the government couldn't afford to build any public houses. But also because private provision of housing went right down the shitter, because no one had any money to build them.

We had a problem of over capacity. Essentially in a recession, you don't fire all your staff. They are just under utilised. When you are emerging from a recession, a lot of companies can get quite a bit busier before they start hiring new people. There's usually a lag between the start of economic growth and an increase I. Employment, but we passed that point over two years ago.

Another feature of burst bubbles is that people are very cautious. Most of the large increase in disposable income In 2015 went to paying off debts and rebuilding savings. That usually changes after a couple of years.

A major.problem facing a government that has had to close a huge budget gap is that there is a huge backlog in Basically everything has to be pit on hold until the mess is resolved, be it public sector pay, infrastructural Investment, or even just dealing with demographic changes. Those are problems for subsequent governments though. They can only be addressed after the finances have been fixed, and not before.

The thing though borracho, is that you shouldn't let your feelings get in the way of reality. This is how people become trump supporters or think that Jose mourinho would be a good idea. They let their feelings of anger and dissatisfaction do their thinking. You're coming perilously close to blaming the firemen who rescued you for starting the dire, and not repairing all the fire damage on the way out.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Indeed, the nation's public purse is doing so well that Leo Varadkar recently announced swingeing cuts to mental health services before walking out the door whistling.

I'm going to ask you again, how many of these alleged "100,000 new jobs" are attributable to JobBridge? (Which, by the way, has been so badly abused by companies nationwide that it has become too embarrassing even for Fine Gael, which last week decided to shut it down.)

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

antoine polus wrote:

Of course Greece was a terrible economy, but what good is continuing to rape a comatose wreck going to achieve? It's the continuing medicine to satisfy the smug burgher of Mittleuropa that grates me.

The argument that you should pay people to dig holes and fill them in again in a slump makes good sense to me, but it might make less sense to creditors. That must be how Greek public administration looks.

But you can't take that amount of money out of an economy. The Eurogroup ought to have got more money in- maybe by building infrastructure themselves and keeping some type of ownership of it.

But the Eurogroup are not acting like creditors, because everything they have done so far has decreased Greece's ability to service its debt.

So either the Eurogroup are incredibly incompetent or they are up to something else besides trying to minimise their losses as creditors.

Or perhaps it is exactly as it appears. Much of the Greek economy over the last couple of decades has consisted of tourism, public sector people jobs, a highly protected private sector services industry that only sold to greeks, and a tiny manufacturing base that sold to Greece. And pensioners. Lots and lots of pensioners. A quarter of the Greek population was retired at the start of the crisis. At the first mention of the end of retirement at 55, 400,000 people, or about 4% of the population immediately applied to retire.

The thing is that Greece couldn't afford this smaller initial level of pensioners at the level they were paying back in the boom. They can afford it less now that their economy is two thirds it's former size, and there's no one prepared to lend them money.

Reforming the pension sector is a huge problem, because if it isn't done soon, Greece is going to struggle to ever recover. They may be approaching a balanced budget, however so much of their expenditure is going towards pension provision that there's very little left for anything else

Now clearly the people who are in receipt of these pensions have an entirely different viewpoint on this. And this group of people became revolutionary socialists overnight when Syriza promised to prevent any changes to the.pension system and an end to cuts.

Now they may as well have promised to pull a nuclear submarine out of their hole. Something has to give. And it's going to have to be Greece. Because they're the ones who need to borrow the money.

Greece aren't being punished for the sake of punishment. They got themselves into this terrible mess through many decades of terrible economic policy and state practice.

If they don't reform, and rebuild their economy along more rational and sustainable lines, they will remain Europe's economic toilet forever.

They really don't want to reform, and Syriza are a manifestation of this as there will be enormous human costs, but there will be enormous human costs either way.

But the Eu are determined to force reform on them whether they like it or not. And since they are the one with the money, they will get their way.

The eu knows that if Greece doesn't reform their pension system and make it more affordable and sustainable, we are going to be back here again in a couple of years time while things drag on forever. If the eu resolves Greece's debt problems tomorrow, then nothing will change. It's only by holding their feet to the fire and demanding reform that they will get anywhere.

Greece should really just get on with it. This fucking around isn't going to get them anywhere.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Borracho wrote: Indeed, the nation's public purse is doing so well that Leo Varadkar recently announced swingeing cuts to mental health services before walking out the door whistling.

I'm going to ask you again, how many of these alleged "100,000 new jobs" are attributable to JobBridge? (Which, by the way, has been so badly abused by companies nationwide that it has become too embarrassing even for Fine Gael, which last week decided to shut it down.)

None. People on these schemes are not counted as employed. It would be much better if you stopped thrashing around and just accepted easily verified facts. It's like talking to a climate change denier.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

antoine polus wrote:

Good nugget from that Michael Lewis piece.

Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

That's a bit of straw man journalism there, because I don't think anybody is claiming that the banks sunk Greece.

And if you say that Greece got into trouble thanks to corrupt politicians engaging in a reckless borrowing binge then the first person to agree with you would be Yannis Varoufakis.

It's a piece written for people familiar with the crash in the US, but not in Greece. Not a strawman really. It's a very important point. The "fault", in Greece, if you want to see it like that, is much more widespread than in the US, or Ireland. Endemic, to use a Greek-derived word.

I've said before that I think the treatment of Ireland is what I find really incomprehensible rather than the (much more brutal) treatment of Greece.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Ireland was run by tax noncompliant politicians who had no bank accounts.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

But not a non taxcompliant private sector population. Much easier to repair.

If the EU couldn't find more to lend to the Irish Government, the UK ought to have done. The recovery would have quicker, to the benefit of both countries.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

But there was no lending of money to the 'Irish government'. Each country loaned an amount of money to Ireland that was roughly equivalent to the amount of money that their own banks were on the hook for in the Irish property market. It was bailing out of European banks dressed up as bailing out Ireland.

The system in Greece was indeed broken in that a large portion of the middle class were siphoning money out of government coffers. Whereas in Ireland it's the Top 1% who are doing it. I would say that neither the Greek scenario nor the Irish scenario are particularly desirable, but our world leaders have a clear preference for one of those two scenarios.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

From the Guardian

There’s another trick hidden in Ireland’s numbers. Alone of all EU countries, Ireland is the beneficiary of a fairly secret but very real policy of monetary financing. While potentially illegal and certainly opposed by ECB and EU policy, Ireland is actually paying off a substantial part of its debt to itself: Ireland’s Central Bank took over the debt of the infamous Anglo Irish Bank, whose speculative excesses cost the Irish economy nearly 20% of GDP when it became insolvent.

In effect, the government pays the Central Bank interest on the debt, which is then returned to the government in the form of surplus income. If Greece could get this deal, the cost of debt would plummet.

These things are OK because Anglo bondholders are the kind of people our leaders like to protect.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

FF were granted three nominees in the Taoiseach's XI, and gave them to non-politicians. The chosen few are:

Paudie Coffey
Michelle Mulherin
Frank Feighan
James Reilly
John O'Mahony
Ray Butler (all FG)
Mary Louise O'Donnell
Pádraig O'Céidigh (Aer Arann)
Joan Freeman (Pieta House)
Billy Lawless
Colette Kelliher (Alzheimer's Ireland)

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Reform pensions? And take even more domestic demand out of the economy? Reforming pensions won’t do a damn thing for Greece other than impoverish another sector of its society and the country further.

The money's coming out of the economy anyway. It would be nice if the others lent more money to Greece but they aren't. It's better for Greece to spend more on investment than pensions. Or indeed better to spend on working age social payments rather than using pensions as an indirect means of paying welfare to younger people.

Nothing off that list strikes me as a ridiculous thing to privatize in Greece. I wouldn't want it privatized here, of course, but we're not talking about a British level of public sector efficiency.

Neo-drachma or no neo-drachma, Greece is going to have to reduce its pension costs anyway.