A church, a Pub, and 2 Ghosts

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Christmas Eve

Bringing Down the House

Lucinda Researched This

Arbeit Macht Frei

IT IS not unusual, at times of economic crisis, that nations retreat inwards. They see others as rivals – sources of strife and aggression. They jealously guard their own patch, while the instinct of citizens and politicians is to batten down the hatches and become more inward looking, seeing solutions to all problems as being internal rather than external.

The trend towards narrow nationalism in Europe is worrying. Irish people speaking ill of the Germans, Germans speaking ill of the Greeks and so on. This vicious cycle needs to be tackled.

Lucinda Researched This

Wall Street Wankers

Treaty of debt

Ghost's

Fiscal Advisory Council

THE MINISTER of Finance Michael Noonan has announced the make-up of the Fiscal Advisory Council, the independent watchdog tasked with overseeing the management of public finances.
Prof John McHale of the NUI Galway will chair the new entity. He will not be paid a salary for taking on the role.
The four other members of the council are Sebastian Barnes of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and a former analyst of the Irish economy for that body; Prof Alan(there will be no crash) Barrett of Trinity College Dublin and a former ESRI economic forecaster; former IMF deputy director Dr Donal Donovan of University of Limerick; and Róisín O’Sullivan, associate professor of economics at Smith College, Massachusetts, who previously worked as an economist at the Central Bank.

Irish Times

Matt Taibbi & Nomi Prins on the financial crisis

Walk Away

Ireland is not Greece

DSK

The People vs Goldman Sachs

Inside Job

Let the good times roll

Obama's Ghost Estate

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Hotspots

Price Stability

From Quant to Want

On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That's when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology. He became, as it were, a Want.

This Tech Bubble Is Different

securitization

The Shoe Box

The Developer

Rathdrum

Bertie's Ghost's

Pause the tour on an Image to Un-Blur and move around

Why aren't Bankesters in Jail

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Vinnie and Willie

The DAA

DAA Pride Barry Murphy Parody from Ciaran McCarthy on Vimeo.

The Anarchist Party

Another Prick in The Dail

Let Them Eat Cheese

Vinnie and Joan

Jump off the sinking Ship

The Bubble Phone

When Irish Eyes are Crying

Kelly’s colleagues in the University College economics department watched his transformation from serious academic to amusing crackpot to disturbingly prescient guru with interest. One was Colm McCarthy, who, in the Irish recession of the late 1980s, had played a high-profile role in slashing government spending, and so had experienced the intersection of finance and public opinion. In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

Vanity Fair

The Clown's downfall

The Flaw

Have You No Shame

The Clown Quits

Corrupt Kleptocracy

A Day is a long time in Irish Politic's

Why hasn't Sean Fitzpatrick been Executed

The American Dream

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