Early warnings, devergent and contrarian views
The Irish economy was set up to fail.
I saw this before anyone else.
I tried to warn people this as often as possible.
The house price bubble would burst and damage the banks. (not sure of exact wording)
I did this in thousands of words.
In the Indo and in the SBP. I made documantaries about this. I had my own show on TV3 which was.
The Pope's Children was the best selling non fiction of the decade.,
The banking crash was absolutely predictable.
This was not isolated thinking.
many thousands of ordinary people saw this coming.
so it was predictable and preventable.
So why did I not just play the game , keep my mouth shut and get on with business.
There is a moral imperative, a patriotic thing to do, to point out that the country was going into catastrophe.
I was accused of being unpatriotic for talking down the economy.
Ireland is split between the insiders - banks, developers, professional classes and government officials, and political parties
and the outsiders in the situation of the housing boom - the people who are forced to play a game where the dice are loaded against them from the start.
two reasons
1) I believed that hundreds of thousands of ordinary people would have their lives destgroyed by debt and negative equity
2) The second reason is that I I worked in theCB and outside in investment banking. Every single day we avoided taking responsiblity for a crisis, the more we ran out of options.
The crash was inevitable - why?
Because of the ways the banks financed themselves
I wrote this back in 2000,2001
This was obvious to anyone who was trained.
The panic of 2008 did not have to happen. It was not preordained. It could have been
If you don't have a housing boom. YOu dont' have a banking crisis. YOu don't have a bailout.