A first look at The Guarantee (2014) which goes on limited release in Irish cinemas on October 30.
Peter Coonan plays Anglo-Irish Bank boss David Drumm (Jonah Hill anyone?), David Murray as the late Brian Lenihan, Morgan C. Jones as Anglo chairman Sean Fitzpatrick and Gary Lydon as Brian Cowen.
Plus a cameo by everyone’s favourite economist Morgan Kelly.
Official Trailer Released for The Guarantee (Wildcard Distribution)
[Today’s Irish Times]
You CAN have it both ways.
Take that, Morgan Kelly.
Pershing college lecturers.
Banks’ SME loan refusal rate rises to 54% (irish Times)
AIB reports 92% approval rate for SME lending (irish Times)
Previously: it’s Not You, it’s SME
In a talk he gave to UCD’s Economics Society last week, Professor Morgan Kelly gave his thoughts on the Irish economy, his first public comments in three years. He had some grim possibilities in mind regarding SMEs and the dumbing down in Irish universities.
Here are some choice quotes:
“The crisis we’re told is over. What have we learned from that? The official narrative that has appeared is very clear. According to this, there were two bad people, Fingleton and Fitzpatrick.”
“This is Ireland, guys. We don’t do competence.”
“All the stuff that happened, all the stuff we talked about. The property boom and bust, the bank collapse, the state bankruptcy. As far as official Ireland is concerned, this was like a bad dream.”
“There’s going to be a big cleanup. It means foreclosures on mortgages and it means dealing with small business loans. What you had during the bubble, owners of SMEs [Small and Medium Enterprises] borrowed a lot to buy property. That was the way you made money back in the happy times. So a lot of these companies have got very big losses on property and they’re basically surviving through bank forbearance. Banks aren’t calling in these loans.”
“We’re going to see a lot of SMEs go under.”
“It’s an enormous problem that no one seems to care about.”
“But even if they [Germany] give us the money for the recapitalisation, the collateral damage to the Irish economy is going to be huge.”
“We are walking into exactly the same situation we were in before with loans to developers. We could see this coming from a long way off. It was going to be a big problem. But in the end Anglo goes under. There’s complete panic. There are midnight meetings. People do very stupid things and it looks like we’re going to face this once again.”
“By failing to produce well-trained graduates you are screwing up your economy in the long run.”
Previously: Morgan Kelly Takes Out Bearded Man In Extra-Judicial Killing
He knows stuff.
Listen to Morgan Kelly’s Kilkenny Arts Festival lecture here
Just when you thought it was safe to back to the Saturday Irish Times.
Professor Morgan Kelly, above, is back.
And he’s taking names. One name in particular.
Patrick Honohan, governor of the central bank:
Brian Lenihan’s original decision to guarantee most of the bonds of Irish banks was a mistake, but a mistake so obvious and so ridiculous that it could easily have been reversed. The ideal time to have reversed the bank guarantee was a few months later when Patrick Honohan was appointed governor of the Central Bank and assumed de facto control of Irish economic policy.
As a respected academic expert on banking crises, Honohan commanded the international authority to have announced that the guarantee had been made in haste and with poor information, and would be replaced by a restructuring where bonds in the banks would be swapped for shares.
Instead, Honohan seemed unperturbed by the possible scale of bank losses, repeatedly insisting that they were “manageable”. Like most Irish economists of his generation, he appeared to believe that Ireland was still the export-driven powerhouse of the 1990s, rather than the credit-fuelled Ponzi scheme it had become since 2000; and the banking crisis no worse than the, largely manufactured, government budget crisis of the late 1980s.
Patrick Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to be the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person. Armed with Honohan’s assurances that the bank losses were manageable, the Irish government confidently rode into the Little Bighorn and repaid the bank bondholders, even those who had not been guaranteed under the original scheme. This suicidal policy culminated in the repayment of most of the outstanding bonds last September…
…At this stage, with Lenihan looking set to exploit his strong negotiating position to seek a bailout of the banks only, Honohan intervened. As well as being Ireland’s chief economic adviser, he also plays for the opposing team as a member of the council of the European Central Bank, whose decisions he is bound to carry out. In Frankfurt for the monthly meeting of the ECB on November 18th, Honohan announced on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland that Ireland would need a bailout of “tens of billions”.
Rarely has a finance minister been so deftly sliced off at the ankles by his central bank governor. And so the Honohan Doctrine that bank losses could and should be repaid by Irish taxpayers ran its predictable course with the financial collapse and international bailout of the Irish State.
Ireland’s Future Depends On Breaking Free From The Bailout (Irish Times)
