Category Archives: News

news as it is happening-ish

Don’t ask them. They run Nama.

Let’s ask the Financial Times:

“Nobody knows. That is all that can be said in reply to Ireland’s most pressing question – is the National Asset Management Agency working? Nama was established to absorb €81bn of bad property loans held by Irish banks, allowing the lenders to recapitalise. Yet the country’s banking crisis continues, two years after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The banks remain on life support through a blanket guarantee on deposits and most debt; Anglo Irish Bank continues to make ludicrous losses; and there is growing scepticism over official assurances that the cost of rescuing the system has been contained.”

Yeah. Yeah. We know that.

Nama is an odd creature: part debt collection agency, part property developer. As well as toxic loans, it may end up with a portfolio of property which was collateral for the banks’ lending binge. It was meant to fix the broken banks, convince taxpayers they might be repaid and reassure the markets the banks’ liabilities would be met in full. Facing in three directions, it has not appeared convincing in any: slow, bureaucratic, initially indecisive and almost excessively transparent (every toxic loan is assessed individually).”

Translation: Probably not.

(No link as FT operate a paywall. Harrumph).


Can one bank (that’d be Anglo) bring down Ireland? Asks the paper this morning.

And, because they don’t know, they ask: how could this have even been possible?

“Ireland was also the country that took the most direct route in tackling the problem [Banking colapse], by recognizing upfront the bad loans of its devastated banks and transferring them to government ledgers.

“Both the United States and Britain avoided such a move by taking stakes in their troubled banks and, in the case of Britain, insuring their worst-performing loans. Now the Irish government’s strategy is being called into question as its credit rating suffers and its borrowing costs resume their upward trajectory.”

Thank heavens nobody outside of New York reads the New York Times. It’s basically a local paper. Like the Evening Echo in Cork. If it had won 104 Pulitzer Prizes.

Bank Strains Ireland (New York Times)

Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, is out today and it has a chapter on Ireland. No mention of Bertie from the snippets we’ve got but he does wax on about:

Paisley: “Once, near the end, he asked me whether I thought God wanted him to make the deal that would seal the peace process. I wanted to say yes, but I hesitated; though I was sure God would want peace, God is not a negotiator. I felt it would be wrong, manipulative, to say yes, and so I couldn’t answer that question, that only he could and I hoped he would let God guide him.”

Adams and McGuinness: “They were an extraordinary couple…Over time I came to like both greatly, probably more than I should have, if truth be told. They were supreme masters of the distinction between tactics and strategy. They knew the destination and they were determined to bring their followers with them, or at least the vast bulk of them.”

Sinn Fein/IRA “I came to the view that the SF/IRA relationship was a bit like that of the Labour leadership and the Labour party NEC [national executive committee]: yes the leadership is powerful, yes it usually gets its way, but not always and rarely without a lot of persuasion and negotiation.”

I Knew Brown Would Be A Disaster (Guardian)

(David Levene, Guardian)