Yesterday the possible failure of a major European bank is likely to have been the trigger for the central banks of the world to hit the panic button and in so doing, admit that the European banking system is in tatters.
Against this background it is interesting to look at what was happening ten and five years ago in the archives. From 5 years ago, I have put up a webchat I did on RTE in November 2006 just after the Popes Children documentary.
It reveals the levels of denial about the housing/credit/banking boom. For those concerned about the Euro today, question 4 is particularly interesting.
The article from 10 years ago, December 2001 is on the budget. It is interesting that back then the article was pointing out that the budget was a sideshow given that the budget in 2000 led to €2billion being injected in to the economy, while private banking lending was running at 10 times that at €24 billion the same year.
We can see that the banking chaos of today was brewing in this lending figure ten years ago. The Irish banking crisis, as I have said over and over again, started in 2000 not 2008.
Hope you enjoy the trip back in time.
Best,
David
David, your contributions during the boom were much appreciated. It is a shame you were not heeded. The degree to which we went overboard during the boom reflect precisely the severity of the bust. But, if one understands the dynamics of the business cycle, is the thing to do on the other side of the boom, not to try and act to stem the (opposite) phenomena of the bust? There is a recognised phenomenon in economics – ‘Failure To See Cycles As Inherent In Capitalism’. So indeed I think it should be a responsibility of economists to ensure the public… Read more »
I have to say too, looking back to those archives, I couldn’t believe you said the following. It had been quite clear what the situation was for some time. ie. that we had a problem of solvency… ” September 21, 2008, David McWilliams The question for the state is whether we are looking at a situation of illiquidity or insolvency. Pessimists say the banks are insolvent; optimists argue they are simply illiquid. IF IT IS INSOLVENCY, WHICH IS STILL UNLIKELY, then there are the normal longer-term measures to deal with bad debts. But if it is illiquidity — a short-term… Read more »
DAVID
Foresight , Forewarned , Forthwith ,Forearmed , Forethought and now Foreword .
Just like the Second World War has it’s origins in the creation of nation states of the 19th century (Franco-Prussian war etc), the banking crisis actually has its origins in the financialisation of Western economies going back to the Nixon presidency and the 1970s. The old line that Ireland was always 20 years behind the US can be applied to the current crisis, Ireland started to take off in the early 1990s, by 1999 you had McCreevy as Finance Minister with the great give aways or McGreevy Doctrine ‘I’ll spend it if I have it’, which coupled with easy money… Read more »
For The Record
I believe the Establishment and many others have dismissed the opportunity the omission of submissions on Irish Banks & Fraud from the Report by the National Crime Forum in 1998 .
There was a reason and there was a conspiracy and the Irish Banks were allowed a free run to act with impunity .
Your Zeitgeist panel discussion is like Irish Stew: – enjoyable when first served; even better on reheating.
Davd argued his case vwel on The Late Late in 2001 and was dismissed by a woman from HP !
DMcW, Somehow I missed these discussions as they happened. I have been in this fight for quite a while. Very interesting you said the crisis began in 2001 – that matches what I have seen. And not only Ireland was plunged into the maelstrom. I must add a pre-cursor, the LTCM blowout in 1998. Many I know were already expecting this. This was catastrophic, and Greenspan unusually plain-text, no obfuscation, said so. Very quickly followed the Glass-Steagall repeal less than 2 years after, spearheaded by Sir Alan, and Summers. Clinton was under massive attack then for even mentioning a new… Read more »
DMcW,
Were derivatives ever discussed anywhere in the archives? The are avoided like the plague even now, 2011, in the blog.
I am amazed at the silence on the very instruments that caused all of this.
Trip Forward In Time Are we witnessing the demise of the English Language following the dual State of The Nations Address by France and Germany ? Does The Fiscal Union means the end of UK as an entity not alone Great Britain ? Will replacements of retired senior civil servants by German and French counterparts oversee the alignment of the new fiscal rules and operational procedures ? After more people leave the country in 2012 et sec will our new national languages be replacing English & Gaeilge ? Will Industrial Parks outside of The Pale become empty ? Will more… Read more »
Trip back in time:
When I visited Ontario, I took this picture here at Niagara and thought: “If we do not stop these, democracies no longer will exist.”
Sadly, it seems I was right.
David McWilliams predicted the crash as early as 2001. Meadows, Meadows and Randers wrote the seminal report “Limits to Growth” in 1972. Anyone who read Limits to Growth understood what would happen in the 2000s as early as the 980s – because what is happening is driven by the inability of the world credit system to expand due to E-C-O-L-O-G-I-C-A-L limits. Hence banks are making fewer loans, because they KNOW growth will slow down in the future because they KNOW we are running low on key resources which fuel growth. Please note: Limits to Growth is an ecoscience book about… Read more »
1980s not 980s! doh! :-)
NOMI PRINS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n2SPeJ7hh4
Where to start really! The government’s white paper is showing that Tax take or government revenue is 700 million Euros below what was expected. The spin from the Dept. of Finance is that although they got it totally arse ways again this year in their pre-budget expectations for the economy in terms of revenue, all is not totally lost because they tell us that expenditures are running at 1000 million Euros below what was expected at this time. The spin is that, although the figures are way off target, which should under normal circumstances highlight the total incompetence of that… Read more »
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1202/1224308474582.html
I was looking back over some of my posts from some time back…..jasus nothing changes… 1. Jim says Given that Europe will invariably bail out Ireland, and later on Ireland will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, it seems to me that the Dail per se will be downgraded to the level of a glorified County Council in the eyes of Europe. As it stands at the moment the Dail has all the appearances of a County Council at work. Look at the evidence. It has boosted its own staff (Public service). It seems totally oblivious to the outside World, which includes… Read more »
7th Day before the Full Moon
Today we will hear The State of Nation Address ……….need I say more……
2012: The Solution
next week: Immediate change of European and each member states Constitution, including the right to own guns of all calibers.
On new years eve, give out unlimited ammo for free and announce a 24 hours amnesty for all crimes being committed. Then flood the Internet with trace Informations on the current locations of bankers and politicians.
Since Angie Merkel might be foisted with the problem she seems to so badly want, is from the DDR, and for sure has forgotten this, Communist Party Secretary Honnecker’s famous last words : “Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism.” (A rhyming couplet in the original German: “Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf”, Berlin, 7 October 1989) Very shortly after, the march from Leipzig tumbled the entire bankrupt mess, and not a single shot was fired – a world record in revolutions. Many here must remember that. Now… Read more »
Legionaires
When you join this army no oath is made to France , no one ask you about your past , no one cares about your future ,you fight only to stay alive and you keep one bullet in your pocket ….just in case you want to stop the enemy take you alive.
Watch the news coming to your screen concerning the german COMMERZBANK soon….
Commerzbank, and Unicredit AGAIN.
Nothing is solved. Bernanke’s Big Bazooka to the rescue!
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article13750329/Faellt-die-Grossbank-Unicredit-spuert-das-ganz-Europa.html
RTE 9:30 PM
Was this a rehearsal of some kind?
Surely this was not the state of the nation address that was announced since days, there must be an error with the broadcasting date/time of some kind.
Certainty
There is no more middle ground!
‘You are Not responsible for The Crisis’ …that was the only honest statement he said .
He omitted to say that while he was in opposition his party failed to report on the signs of the oncoming Crisis and preferred to eat the fat then .
He demeanour was like a Frozen Pea on a POD on a sell by date shelf .
He looked like Angela with aftershave .
My take on it is, this was ‘Lady Cromwell ‘ .
I wonder if Kenny is banking on “fiscal union” to rescue FG? Well has a shock coming. What he will get is intrusive control on the Dail from the Commission, enforced austerity. That’s it. A Dec. 3 {Daily Telegraph} article by Liam Halligan, which says that the “fiscal union” which the Empire’s banks are all demanding, is never going to happen, because Germany cannot and will not go along. “Market denizens are desperate for `fiscal union’ before the end of the year,” Halligan writes. This “would also spark the mother of all equity market rallies, as the ECB sprayed-out QE… Read more »
CERN: December 13th, 2011
Make a calendar note and check the website on this date.
The CERN Higgs Boson is supposed to save the Big Bang. We have spent Euro billions to rescue the standard model. Science is in exactly the same situation as the Euro.
If we just get the Euro “fundamentals” right all peace and prosperity would follow automatically?
We are waiting for the State of the Universe Address, with a Kenny lookalike, and a long trail of titles, announcing the God Particle.
There is a flaw in the Standard Model, and its is not the execution!
A Commission has replaced currencies and God. All bow and hail Higgs!
Amazing.
@ bonbo I refer to limits to growth as a concept, not to the 1973 report from the Club of Rome – which horrified the scientific and political establishment so much, they rolled out the big guns & big money to shoot it down (clearly money well spent in your case). Nonetheless, conspiracy theories or no… ‘No limits to growth’ implies infinite growth on a finite planet, which is mathematically, physically and biologically impossible. I dont know how i can express this in any simpler terms. Last time i checked startrek was only on telly, and we’ve only the WAN… Read more »
Could it be that Kenny and the Goldman Sachs operatives running countries near you, are so sure the public will accept murderous austerity, because they believe the people accept limits to growth as a law of economics. 40 years of constant indoctrination since the Club of Rome manual have softened up the masses for slaughter? I’ll bet they have calculated paltry irrational resistance. That’s the smirking wink “well we all know we are living beyond the limits”, “we have to accept these measures”, “there is nothing we can do against laws of the universe”. No physical economic growth in the… Read more »
@bonbon Could it be that your James Bond “baddies”, your globalist rogue villains, Goldman Sachs and Henry Kissinger and the rest of them, are controlling ALL of the world’s oil producers and thus keeping the price of oil “artificially” above $100/barrel? Or could the oil industry geologists like Colin Campbell (who lives in Ballydehob) be right that we have reached the half-way point in consumption of the world’s oil reserves, with permanently high prices now the new normal, necessarily due to production constraints relative to demand, a.k.a “Peak Oil”? Or is….Colin Campbell of Ballydehob secretly working for Henry Kissinger and… Read more »
Jaysus lads maybe i should move home from australia…. Clearly the paronoid delusional quality of the marjuana back home has increased exponentially (no limits to growth!!) since i left.
Maybe the the climate change / limits to growth concepts are elaborate conspiracies, orchestrated by the british royal family, so they can practice genocide on poor people again and thus regain their global hegemony once more.
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