Stick your Promissory Note deal up your arse Kenny.

EURATS wrote: »

I support Ireland and the people of Ireland.

Yes, and obviously I don't...FFS, come up with a less obvious strawman!

EURATS wrote: »

Your kind I view as traitors who should be dealt with accordingly.

Fortunately your blind rage will always be of the impotent variety. You'll never be in a position to carry out your purification of 'traitors' (i.e. those with a different viewpoint).

EURATS wrote: »

Ur kind continued this countries ruination and continue to live lavishly while they slash everyone else around them.

By the time you're finished...everyone in this country will despise you.

Uh...what? I love this mental picture you have created - tell me, what does my girlfriend look like? What kind of food do I like?

EURATS wrote: »

I think FG are the blind ones. They never knew what they were going to do. Just like you. You do laughable background checks on all the posters in here and come up with feck all. Just like your dear leader.

I think I'm on record as saying I don't support FG, or Labour for that matter. But never mind...

EURATS wrote: »

I would hardly make potent threats to be honest. If I was to do that, I'd feel obliged to carry them out..and for the likes of you and ur crew? U will ruin yourselves anyway(almost there already)

Ah yes...

*throws imaginary pile of banknotes into the air, strokes white cat* :pac:

flutered wrote: »

do some posters here from the blue side of the fence really do background checkes on peeps, thats creepy, as in very creepy, kinda like their distant cousins the brownshirts.

Background checks like checking if someone has posted on the CT forum when they swear up and down that they never did? Yeah, some posters would go to that sort of length... :pac:

Of course, I'm not from any side of any fence. I'm a pragmatist, and I don't think there's any party that actually represents my views.

EURATS wrote: »

Your on record as a waffler.

Well I've actually tried to discuss stuff here. You've done your usual RABBLE RABBLE routine. You could probably save time by just copying the same rant about Inda Kinny onto every thread you 'contribute' to - nobody could tell the difference.

EURATS wrote: »

I didn't really care to be honest. I hadn't bothered looking back. As I said it was moved there and has no relevance to this thread

You said? Odd, it was posted from Seaneh's account. Ok, that might explain a lot. So you are a doppel? A sock puppet?

Seaneh wrote: »

stuff gets moved form AH and politics to CT forum all the time, odds are, he never actually posted in CT.

Of course, as I pointed out, it wasn't moved there - it started off in the CT forum. Hence the first reply: "what's the conspiracy theory?"

EURATS wrote: »

It was moved there by the mod if I remember correctly.Has no relevance anyway.

Odd that you denied it twice if it doesn't matter.

EURATS wrote: »

The same way as YOU have no relevance.

ZING! Of course, you are highly relevant. Highly.

Mark200 wrote: »

Um the IMF have been on our side on this issue for a long time, calling for a debt deal. And so have Germany. The ECB rejected the proposed solution due to legal issues. Germany have also said before that they consider Ireland to be a special case, but that it's up to us to ensure that any proposed deal would not open the door for other programme countries to get the same deal. Obviously this balance was not achieved in the plan that the ECB reviewed. It's not all down to "negotiating skill", it's down to legal technicalities.

You must be new here. Your not allowed to let the truth get in the way of a good whinge in After Hours.

madalig12 wrote: »

Of course we are a 'special case', only a 'special case' would ask their population to hand over 3.1BILLION a year, every year until 2023. And think it was actually possible to even try. We will have so much borrowed to pay this bank debt that it will be nigh on impossible for any future generation to get close to paying it off.

Yeah, there's no way we are paying off all that debt, and I think everybody knows it. We're heading into Bailout Mark 2 (Bailout: with a vengeance). The question at this stage is how much of the debt we can have written off or deferred. If they can defer paying back - say - the promissory notes for 50 years or thereabouts, then inflation and economic growth will deal with the vast majority of it. The NPV of 30 billion after 50 years of 4% inflation is a little over 4.2 billion, at 5% inflation it's only 2.6 billion. Assuming our economy grows at similar rates, that's also going to be a much smaller proportion of GDP than it is today.

So yeah, we aren't paying back all that money one way or another. The trick is how to pay as little of it back as possible with the least harm done to the public while doing it. And of course our flawed politics, electorate and politicians militate against genuinely radical or difficult choices being made.

flutered wrote: »

the imf sayes we have a case, the germans say we have a case, BUT we have to do it in such a way that no other country can benifit as well as ourselves, so what brain fart does brown nose baldy and the euneh come up with, they enlists the help of the of portaguese finance minister to give him back up, the one fkucen thing that the germans asked him not to do, theres thick and theres fkucen thick, hands up which varity are the eunech and brown nose.

Unfortunately, when it comes to economics, the alternatives are even worse...

flutered wrote: »

well we have tried one version of tragic concoquences, another version cannot do much more harm, now can it.

Tragedy upon tragedy? I don't think that would help. To be fair, I respect Sinn Fein in that they actually stand for something, but their economic ideas are completely nuts.

What I can't convey enough here is that we had two (broad) choices for dealing with the bankruptcy FFailure left us with.

Option 1. Hard default. Don't pay the debts of the banks that Fianna Failure guaranteed. The good news is that we wouldn't have to pay back the bondholders (note that nearly all of those debts have already been repaid now, so it's too late to do anything about the vast majority of that debt). The bad news is that we would have had to cut government spending OVERNIGHT to what the government could raise in taxes here. Most people would lose their savings (and pensions?). Taxes would have gone through the roof, public sector salaries slashed (halved?), schools and hospitals closed, strikes everywhere, all the time, 30% unemployment, businesses closing all over the place, queues for food etc. etc.

This could have gone on for a year or two. People defintely would have died as a direct result, and there would probably have been massive civil disorder, blood on the streets etc.

But the good news is we probably would have started recovering after a couple of years, and - with little public debt - we could have returned to growth and recovered quite quickly after that.

Option 2: Take the bailout.

The bad news: as you see it. Some increased taxes, some cuts. High (but not massive) unemployment. A mood of public dissatisfaction. Minor protest. People will die due to this option due to health cutbacks and so forth. Perhaps more will die in total?

The good news: not nearly the same level of carnage and suffering that the hard default would have caused in the short term.

But - an extra bit of bad news - option 2 goes on for a decade, 15 years or so. Not just 2 or 3 years before recovery starts, as with option 1.

Personally, as I've stated, I think we should have gone for a hard default a couple of years ago, but Irish politicians (of any stripe) would never deliberately take such a hard road. Also, it's easy for me to say that as I'm not tied to Ireland and could leave if things get messy. I'd worry about my parents and older people in general - petrol shortages, queueing for food, losing their life savings and security etc. is not how OAPs should be spending their time.

As I've tried to say from the start of the thread: once Fianna Failure ruined us, there was no easy way out. We could only choose different flavours of suffering for different periods of time.

Big Steve wrote: »

I agree.

AFAIK aren't Greece on their 3rd bailout. They just decided to say f**k you we're not paying you back.

The least we could do is dig our heels in on it and tell them to back the f**k off we're paying them back so cut us some slack.

Steve, have a look at my post about the NPV of a debt that they defer for 50 years. That will give you an idea of the benefits of debt deferral (depending on how it is implemented, of course).