Well, somebody’s got to win.

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Constance                                                               Maximumus

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As we said earlier, last night’s Tonight With Vincent Browne was a humdinger.

Here’s our favourite slice:

Max Keiser: “This is where it veers into financial, I call it financial terrorism because they’re using these derivatives in a way that Warren Buffett has called weapons of mass financial destruction. In a lot of ways they are, because you’re totally destroying the banking system and the economy and it’s causing now people in Ireland to suffer austerity for something they themselves were not a party to. They’re not the ones who caused this problem and yet they’re the ones who are being asked to suffer the austerity.”

“Ireland has, what, $80bn of debt they’re trying to work through, which is a number that is by many estimates closer to €500bn. Thisamount of money, this debt, this is the result of these banks, when they initiated these mortgages and these loans, immediately selling
them into the global aftermarket.”

Vincent Browne: “I don’t think that happened in Ireland actually.”

Keiser: “Sure it did. The property developers, working with Anglo Irish Bank and the global syndication of wholesale lending and derivatives trading, took that risk off their balance sheet. That’s how this country got into such an incredible mess and overleveraged
problems. Because these banks never retained the debts on their balance sheet. They took them off their balance sheet which gave them the wherewithal to take more loans.”

Brian Lucey: “No no, Max, not in – I mean to some extent that happened, and there’s no doubt it did happen, particularly towards the end of the boom it was beginning to happen in a big way. But we’ve had a much more plain vanilla property crash.”

Browne: “What’s vanilla?”

Lucey: “It’s a pod that grows in Madagascar.”

Browne: “Is there any way that people could speak normal English?
What’s vanilla? I thought vanilla was an ice cream.”

Lucey: “It is. It’s also a rapper.”

Browne: “A what?”

Constantin Gurdgiev: “It’s the most plain form of ice cream and therefore what Brian is saying is pretty much correct. We had a traditional property boom and bust of immense proportions. Max is also correct to an extent… We are the German headache as much as Germany is our headache because it’s German banks’ borrowings which have
precipitated that crisis as much on one side of the balance sheet as our own banks have caused.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bznaoxt7OI&feature=player_embedded#at=212

Watch full show here

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