The Legacy of Brian Lenihan

later10

later10 wrote: »

Why, do you think all the children would be at home getting ready for work in the morning if he had let the banks go down? Have any savings yourself?

Anglo should not have been saved yet he prioritised it and nationalised it!!!
Now that should tell you all you need to know

later12

Deleted User wrote: »

Anglo should not have been saved yet he prioritised it and nationalised it!!!
Now that should tell you all you need to know

Anglo is reasonably debatable, but the poster said the banks... banks... plural.

later10

later10 wrote: »

Anglo is reasonably debatable, but the poster said the banks... banks... plural.

yeah fair enough point but the general gist of blowing so much money on say anglo alone then is enough that our children will be paying

DexyDrain

Honohan's report was clear enough, Anglo was of systemic importance, letting it fall would have been a more uncontrollable disaster than letting the air out of the balloon slowly.

K-9

Deleted User wrote: »

yeah fair enough point but the general gist of blowing so much money on say anglo alone then is enough that our children will be paying

The problem with not guaranteeing Anglo was contagion. Anglo was a mess, as it turned out, they all were. I don't think too many envisaged the total collapse of Irish banks and building societies, even EBS who were relatively safe.

I think there's too much focus on the guarantee with the benefit of hindsight. Once it was obvious we were lied to Anglo should have been ditched in an orderly fashion.

steelcityblues

DexyDrain wrote: »

Honohan's report was clear enough, Anglo was of systemic importance, letting it fall would have been a more uncontrollable disaster than letting the air out of the balloon slowly.

They manipulated shareholders, so they take the wrap, and not be treated like royalty by daddy Government.

Just like we would expect a drunk driver who has killed someone, to not be back on the roads again.

DexyDrain

That's where we had our backs to the wall. The only money flowing into the banks was from the EU, without that the banks would have fallen, they had a very simple condition: do not let a bank fall, do not scare the sh*t out of bondholders.

steelcityblues

DexyDrain wrote: »

That's where we had our backs to the wall. The only money flowing into the banks was from the EU, without that the banks would have fallen, they had a very simple condition: do not let a bank fall, do not scare the sh*t out of bondholders.

Nope, the message is: protect the elite before everyone else.

carrolls

Di0genes wrote: »

It's a dishonest claim that Mc Williams and Mc Williams only convinced Lenihan to do engage in a blanket bank guarantee.

I'll admit you could have just been ignorant and been incorrect. But you made it seem like you were completely sure of the facts, so to my mind it's dishonest.

Don't dismiss something without checking the facts yourself. Thats dishonest.
McWilliams admitted advising Lenihan in the days before the guarantee was announced.
http://www.tribune.ie/news/editorial-opinion/article/2011/jan/16/diarmuid-doyle-after-his-bank-guarantee-david-mcwi/
Was the Tribune sued by McWilliams for printing this story? No. So do the math.

DexyDrain

steelcityblues wrote: »

Nope, the message is: protect the elite before everyone else.

Eh, investors, bondholders, hedge funds do not give a flying f*ck who lives on the posh side of town in Dublin or Hamburg, they just want to avoid poor performing assets and bad debts.

steelcityblues

DexyDrain wrote: »

Eh, investors, bondholders, hedge funds do not give a flying f*ck who lives on the posh side of town in Dublin or Hamburg, they just want to avoid poor performing assets and bad debts.

I meant the actions of the Dept. of finance. :rolleyes:

D1stant

gandalf wrote: »

The man was part of the FF Governments who have caused the ruination of this country and was directly responsible for the disastrous bank guarantee scheme.

I also disagree with those that say he was brave to continue on after his diagnosis with cancer. I believe he was arrogant and irresponsible both to his family and the country for carrying on. I certainly do not believe he was in the right frame of mind to make sound decisions on the financial future of this country. If Cowen was a proper leader he should have insisted that his friend take a leave of absence but we already know what a spineless poor leader he was.

Did you know him?

Coming on here and saying he was irresponsible to his family is a very low comment. Some of which will probably read this thread I know BLs legacy will be discussed. But pease not now.

Its really disrespectful IMHO

The boards.ie Mods should lock all BL threads until Monday.

DexyDrain

What actions in particular were designed to protect 'the elites'? Really curious now.

Di0genes

KINGVictor wrote: »

In retrospect, should he have made some of the decisions he made as Minister of Finance...absolutely not. That is why we can make this assertions in a retrospective manner like any of us would have done things differently giving the time constraints. Do not forget that he sought advise from various reputable organisations and interested bodies that actually encouraged him to give a blanket guarantee!...

In retrospect, whom or did or did not seek advise from is irrelevant. He made the decisions.

Another interesting view held by some posters is the fact that some people have committed suicide because of the current economic crises...very tragic!!, but the truth is that people were killing themselves at the height of the boom also when money was hardly scarce. I think that has to do with mental conditions rather than economic implications. One could indeed argue that if they were strong minded then there would be no need to kill themselves. Far more people in worse economic conditions that overcome the challenges.

Thats profoundly classy.

In summary, BL made serious errors of judgement but I doubt we can question his loyalty to the Irish people.

He made decisions that protected investors in Irish banks at the expense of Irish Taxpayers.

Put simply he ensured people who gambled on Ireland where paid were paid, and he did so by passing the bill to the Irish People.

So yes he made serious errors of judgement and he made the Irish People pay for it.

So yes quiet frankly I do question his loyalty to the Irish people and I'm very comfortable doing so.

steelcityblues

DexyDrain wrote: »

What actions in particular were designed to protect 'the elites'? Really curious now.

NAMA, bailouts, IMF intervention?

Stop playing innocent here.

yosser hughes

DexyDrain wrote: »

Honohan's report was clear enough, Anglo was of systemic importance, letting it fall would have been a more uncontrollable disaster than letting the air out of the balloon slowly.

Not true and that's actually a distortion.

Di0genes

DexyDrain wrote: »

What actions in particular were designed to protect 'the elites'? Really curious now.

From the Vanity fair piece

What exactly was said in meetings on
the night of September 29, 2008,
remains, amazingly, something
of a secret. The government has refused
Freedom of Information Act–type requests
for records. But gathered around the conference
tables inside the prime minister’s
offices was an array of top government and
finance officials, including Lenihan, Cowen,
the attorney general, and bank officials and
regulators. Eventually they brought in the
heads of the two yet-to-be-disgraced big Irish
banks: A.I.B. and Bank of Ireland. Evidently
they either lied to Brian Lenihan about the
extent of their losses or didn’t know themselves
what those were. Or both. “At the time
they were all saying the same thing,” an Irish
a choice: Should he believe the people immediately
around him or the financial markets?

Should he trust the family or the experts?
He stuck with the family. Ireland gave
its promise. And the promise sank Ireland.
Even at the time, the decision seemed
a bit odd. The Irish banks, like the
big American banks, managed to
persuade a lot of people that they were so
intertwined with their economy that their
failure would bring down a lot of other
things, too. But they weren’t, at least not
all of them. Anglo Irish Bank had only six
branches in Ireland, no A.T.M.’s, and no
organic relationship with Irish business except
the property developers. It lent money
to people to buy land and build: that’s
practically all it did. It did this mainly with
money it had borrowed from foreigners. It
was not, by nature, systemic. It became so
only when its losses were made everyone’s.

In any case, if the Irish wanted to save
their banks, why not guarantee just the
deposits? There’s a big difference between
depositors and bondholders: depositors
can flee. The immediate danger to the
banks was that savers who had put money
into them would take their money out,
and the banks would be without funds.
The investors who owned the roughly 80billion euros of Irish bank bonds, on the
other hand, were stuck. They couldn’t take
their money out of the bank. And their 80
billion euros very nearly exactly covered
the eventual losses inside the Irish banks.
These private bondholders didn’t have any
right to be made whole by the Irish government.

The bondholders didn’t even expect
to be made whole by the Irish government.
Not long ago I spoke with a former senior
Merrill Lynch bond trader who, on September
29, 2008, owned a pile of bonds in
one of the Irish banks. He’d already tried
to sell them back to the bank for 50 cents
on the dollar—that is, he’d offered to take
a huge loss, just to get out of them. On the
morning of September 30 he awakened to
find his bonds worth 100 cents on the dollar.
The Irish government had guaranteed
them! He couldn’t believe his luck. Across
the financial markets this episode repeated
itself. People who had made a private bet
that went bad, and didn’t expect to be
repaid in full, were handed their money
back—from the Irish taxpayer.
In retrospect, now that the Irish bank
losses are known to be world-historically
huge, the decision to cover them appears
not merely odd but suicidal. A handful of
Irish bankers incurred debts they could
never repay, of something like 100 billion
euros. They may have had no idea what
they were doing, but they did it all the
same. Their debts were private—owed by
them to investors around the world—and
still the Irish people have undertaken to
repay them as if they were obligations of
the state. For two years they have labored
under this impossible burden with scarcely
a peep of protest. What’s more, all of
the policy decisions since September 29,
2008, have set the hook more firmly inside
the mouths of the Irish public.

In January 2009 the Irish government nationalized
Anglo Irish and its 34-billion-euro (and
mounting) losses. In late 2009 they created
the Irish version of the tarp program, but,
unlike the U.S. government (which ended
up buying stakes in the banks), they actually
followed through on the plan and are
in the process of buying 70 billion euros
of crappy assets from the Irish banks.

DexyDrain

Wait, let me get a pen and paper, you think the setting up of NAMA (which developers go to court to fight off), bailouts to keep our banks doors open for when you want to actually access your wages, life savings, credit facility etc. and the insistence of the IMF in being part of any special below market interest rate loans within the eurozone, is proof the Dept. of Finance really just wanted to protect elites?? Really?

later12

steelcityblues wrote: »

IMF intervention?

And without IMF intervention, how would the state fund frontline services and welfare supports? frustration?

DexyDrain

yosser hughes wrote: »

Not true and that's actually a distortion.

I'll dig you out the quote and reference so you can actually check yourself.

yosser hughes

DexyDrain wrote: »

Wait, let me get a pen and paper, you think the setting up of NAMA (which developers go to court to fight off), bailouts to keep our banks doors open for when you want to actually access your wages, life savings, credit facility etc. and the insistence of the IMF in being part of any special below market interest rate loans within the eurozone, is proof the Dept. of Finance really just wanted to protect elites?? Really?

I don't think you know what you are talking about.Out of your depth. You betray a monumental ignorance of what went on.
Sorry if that's harsh but it's true.

Di0genes

later10 wrote: »

And without IMF intervention, how would the state fund frontline services and welfare supports? frustration?

If we had not created NAMA to bail out property developers, or created a bank guarantee to bail out bank speculators we would not have needed such a epic bail out for our frontline services and welfare support.

DexyDrain

yosser hughes wrote: »

Not true and that's actually a distortion.

Here you go, Box 8.4, Pg 131 I've highlighted a sentence you may have missed.

Under these circumstances a default by a €100 billion bank such as Anglo Irish Bank
would undoubtedly have put funding pressure on the other main Irish banks via contagion,
given the broad similarities in the type and geography of their property-related lending,
their common implicit reliance on the backing of the Irish State, and even name confusion.
In this sense, the systemic importance of Anglo Irish Bank at that time cannot seriously be
disputed

http://www.bankinginquiry.gov.ie/The%20Irish%20Banking%20Crisis%20Regulatory%20and%20Financial%20Stability%20Policy%202003-2008.pdf

DexyDrain

yosser hughes wrote: »

I don't think you know what you are talking about.Out of your depth. You betray a monumental ignorance of what went on.
Sorry if that's harsh but it's true.

If it's true, stick around and make your point.

tweedledee

So many naive people here.People seem to think that the first bailout took place in minutes with no time to spare and honahan is a saint from heaven with no involvment.Remember the start of the movie Wall Street 2,with all the bankers and polititians sitting around the table thats how its actually done in real life.
Major players about major issues all singing from the same hym sheet.
Plans are discussed for hours,showpieces are planned way in advance,contacts in EVERY media are contacted and they feed the gullible public what is needed to know.
Linehan.Cowan and his posse sat down for hours and discussed everything in detail.
The garbage on the papers/tv is just that, government garbage which the Irish swallow every time which is why we are in the state we are in.

DexyDrain

Di0genes wrote: »

If we had not created NAMA to bail out property developers, or created a bank guarantee to bail out bank speculators we would not have needed such a epic bail out for our frontline services and welfare support.

Tell me how NAMA works, as you understand it.

The guarantee prevented the closure of the banks within 24-48 hours. If you keep your gold bullion stashed in the garden pond, that's no problem. Read the Honohan report.

steelcityblues

DexyDrain wrote: »

Wait, let me get a pen and paper, you think the setting up of NAMA (which developers go to court to fight off), bailouts to keep our banks doors open for when you want to actually access your wages, life savings, credit facility etc. and the insistence of the IMF in being part of any special below market interest rate loans within the eurozone, is proof the Dept. of Finance really just wanted to protect elites?? Really?

For the taxpayer? It will just saddle more debt onto them overtime, while allowing for inflation of property prices.

Frank Daly wants to stop the fall in commercial property prices, but how many will be wealthy enough to get on this ladder, once everyone has taken 'some of the pain'. The letters S C A M come to mind.

Elites in the public sector have no intention of taking on considerable reductions either, which limits the distribution of money too.

BTW, i've noticed you have only joined here since Lenihan's death, but i'm sure you really are an 'independent' contributor.

DexyDrain

steelcityblues wrote: »

For the taxpayer? It will just saddle more debt onto them overtime, while allowing for inflation of property prices.

Frank Daly wants to stop the fall in commercial property prices, but how many will be wealthy enough to get on this ladder, once everyone has taken 'some of the pain'. The letters S C A M come to mind.

Elites in the public sector have no intention of taking on considerable reductions either, which limits the distribution of money too.

BTW, i've noticed you have only joined here since Lenihan's death, but i'm sure you really are an 'independent' contributor.

You have noticed incorrectly I am not psychic before you ask.

tweedledee

for Later,the state has and still has,25 BILLION in cash reserves to play with,thats why the EU are treating us sooo badly,they know we have the ability to pay our way.

later12

Di0genes wrote: »

If we had not created NAMA to bail out property developers, or created a bank guarantee to bail out bank speculators we would not have needed such a epic bail out for our frontline services and welfare support.

Can you look back into your tea cups, Madame Diogenes, and tell us what our status would be without a banking sector, and further what the implications of no bank guarantee might have been for household savers and the average worker?

Oh and the lottery numbers while youre at it.