Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny just told Reuters his thoughts on the European Financial Stability Facility, the fund responsible for bailing out Portugal, Ireland, and Greece and keeping contagion from spreading.

It’s not going to work—at least not as it stands right now.

Specifically, he said the October 26 agreement to leverage the fund to about $1.4 trillion is “insufficient” and has not succeeded in returning confidence to the markets.

These statements echo what the majority of economists and analysts have been saying for months.

Here are some reasons they’ve been citing on this assertion:

– $1.4 trillion is just not enough to build an adequate firewall between Italy and Spain, and certainly not enough to bail out Italy.

– Insuring 20-30% of losses on sovereign bonds would not convince investors to purchase them.

– If investors are going to lose 70-80% of the value of their bond holdings, that’s really not much better than default anyway.

– There are major doubts that any countries, investors, or sovereign wealth funds would actually buy bonds issued to fund the leverage plan.

Kenny In Conflict With Merkel (Derek Scally, Irish Times)

The Days of Noah 2: Apocalypse: a documentary film about a discovery that ‘transcends searching for history’. (Sorry, what?)

Could a Chinese/Turkish expeditionary team have found the remains of Noah’s Ark high in the mountains of Ararat?

Can science now finally shut up and accept that the Old Testament is an accurate historical document?

Will they find a live T-Rex inside the thing?

A few months ago, National Geographic examined the findings of the evangelical Noah’s Ark Ministries International.

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Broadsheet.ie