Why don't we riot like mad ejits

Jonny7 wrote: »

A group of people interested in open, transparent, honest politics - like Direct Democracy Ireland?

if we create new parties we need new thieves , sorry politicians , because if we create new party and have the same idiots there, it's like taking a shower and putting the same clothes on which were worn before taking the shower...

SpaceTime wrote: »

Sorry lads, I think most people realised it was actually our own speculative sector and its political and media fanboys that inflated and crashed the economy, not some weird outside agencies of any type. The outside agencies just got in on the action with handing our speculators vast amounts of loans as they were all was 'chasing the dream' of a quick buck.

One thing about Ireland that I notice is actually a strength and a weakness is we tend to be quite capable of washing our dirty linen in public when something does come out in the open eventually.

A lot of other cultures try to find outsiders to blame for any major problem - immigrants, minority groups like the Jewish community in the past, global conspiracy theories. The Greeks are blaming Angela Merkel and the EU for what was effectively their own establishment's fiscal and financial mismanagement. Yeah, the EU didn't rescue them to the level they might have liked and yeah the EU's policies acted a bit like an accelerant but there was no outsiders trying to wreck Greece, on the contrary they tried to rescue it with billions and billions of Euro.

Unfortunately, it was our own home-grown speculators that wrecked the place and I think the vast majority of us understand that fully.

The weakness is that we tend to then go into some kind of weird self-flagellation mode and start wallowing in a combination of self pity and slagging ourselves off.

I think though that's why we're not having riots. We know exactly what happened.

The most important thing we need to do now is get ourselves back into some degree of normality and respectability and stop with the depressing self-harm stuff and keep an eye out for any more half-wit speculator fanboys/girls trying to inflate more bubbles.

There is barely a country in the world where bad regulation wasn't a problem - the problem here is, the ECB should have been given regulatory powers to deal with this centrally, but this was decided against for political reasons, even though it was a near-indispensable requirement for ensuring stability.

It's not all on us. The Euro itself was simply a disaster waiting to happen, right from the start, because all of Europe is to blame for implementing it and accepting it, in such a broken fashion.

You can't neatly place the blame on each individual EU country, because all of Europe is responsible for implementing a system, that was guaranteed to cause a deadlock, upon hitting an economic crisis.

It was literally just waiting to happen, because the Euro was broken right from the start - only ably to function properly when there is no economic instability.

Kyus - no point, they will not understand , you are another conspiracy theory guy... you write in too complicated language...

KyussBishop wrote: »

There is barely a country in the world where bad regulation wasn't a problem - the problem here is, the ECB should have been given regulatory powers to deal with this centrally, but this was decided against for political reasons, even though it was a near-indispensable requirement for ensuring stability.

It's not all on us. The Euro itself was simply a disaster waiting to happen, right from the start, because all of Europe is to blame for implementing it and accepting it, in such a broken fashion.

You can't neatly place the blame on each individual EU country, because all of Europe is responsible for implementing a system, that was guaranteed to cause a deadlock, upon hitting an economic crisis.

It was literally just waiting to happen, because the Euro was broken right from the start - only ably to function properly when there is no economic instability.

I don't really buy that. Other than the ECB and Eurozone powers were idiotic in assuming banks would behave sensibly and in the public interest or that national regulators would be able to control things or would even want to.

The behaviour that went on here was utterly deplorable across the whole speculative sector and people were calling it out for years. David McWilliams, various Prime Time programmes etc etc all pointing out that we were in a huge bubble.

The establishment didn't listen to a word of it, nor did many of the people voting for them either.

Many, many other parts of the Eurozone did not have these problems because their economies didn't go into meltdown. Yeah, they felt some effects of it, but they didn't spectacularly crash and burn like we did or like Spain did. (The Greek situation's a little different)

The Eurozone didn't force Anglo & the lads to do what they did nor did they force various speculators to build houses in places where there was no market. It may have made it possible for the banks to go mad, but it didn't cause them to.

kult wrote: »

The plan is and always was: get countries into a huge debt, crush the economy and make people slaves , and it's working. We are all slaves to the system which squeezes out more and more of us... some of us just do not realize this just yet...and euro zone is a total failure, always was, even at the very beginning...

The plan was actually the complete opposite.
It may have backfired horribly, but that was most definitely not the plan.

Whole thing actually started off with a huge degree of optimism.

What we're paying for is the consequences of out of control speculation both here in Ireland and by other financial institutions elsewhere in the world.

The bailouts happened because those institutions were big enough to hold a gun to the heads of various governments and probably the ECB and various other agencies.

Solution : probably shrink the financial sector and regulate it back into a manageable situation again.

Take away the dole and Sky sports and there would be a second Republic in a week.

It is about time we got off our fat complacent arses and threw some of this sh1t back at the govt.

DistanceVector wrote: »

Take away the dole and Sky sports and there would be a second Republic in a week.

It is about time we got off our fat complacent arses and threw some of this sh1t back at the govt.

take away the x factor and there will be war haha

KyussBishop wrote: »

Europe had a responsibility, to implement a banking system with adequate checks and balances, i.e. regulations, and to implement this centrally - not to leave it only half-implemented, which is something many of the economists who participated in putting together the Euro, knew was a problem.

Also consider this: All economies have boom and bust cycles, and there is never a logical reason to assume there will never be another economic crisis.
The Euro, in its initial construction and still now, is completely incapable of dealing with any crisis - it was going to blow up and put countries in a deadlock eventually, as soon as a big enough crisis hit.

The safeguards and mechanisms needed to deal with crisis, were removed from countries when they lost monetary sovereignty, no safeguards/mechanisms were put in place when that monetary control was centralized within Europe - it was a guaranteed failure, right from the start, and again many of the principle economists responsible for founding the Euro (such as Bernard Lietaer) knew about this, and warned about it.

That's a failure, which lies in the hands of all of Europe - you can't fob all of that off onto individual countries, and individually blame them for a system which was guaranteed to fail.

Well basically what happened was you took a primarily German idea of controlling inflation (and putting this above all other concerns) and bolted it onto a EU that it doesn't remotely operate like Germany and where inflation has been used as a tool to deal with boom-bust cycles.

The Germans aren't really prepared to budge on that, due to being completely irrational fear of inflation (despite their reputation for level headedness they're anything but).

That's fundamentally the core problem - Eurozone policies reflect Germany's old DM policies and not the Eurozone as a whole.

It was undoubtedly well-intentioned : bringing price stability and fiscal certainty but, it doesn't work.

...

If Eurozone policies reflected the reality of the Eurozone and the Euro's value were allowed to drop to a more realistic level actually reflecting the European economies, things would probably be in a much better situation.

...

On the regulation aspect of it, yeah it was cart before horse.

It still doesn't mean Ireland's speculative bubble was caused by the Eurozone though. It was facilitated by it rather than caused by it.

As I said, uncle Hitler would be proud, Germany destroyed europe without a single gunshot...

KyussBishop wrote: »

Sorry but, if it was that innocent, then why are none of the necessary reforms in place?

European governments, principally Germany, have directly stifled meaningful reform; torpedoing/neutering attempts at reform.

We're still in a system, almost equally as primed to implode as it was 7 years ago, and nothing has changed - not even the problems from this crisis have been dealt with, and we are facing more crisis not far off in the future.

If every country in Europe, really has good intent here and wants to see a working Euro system, we'd have seen reform by now - 7 years gone already!

Because, despite what people think, the Germans are totally irrational about certain things.

Inflation - terror of it due to Weimar Republic hyper inflation days. Complete lack of ability to see that inflation may actually help in this situation.
Nuclear power - effectively shut down their nuclear power plants without any idea what they were going to do to provide energy and have caused a CO2 spike + major increase in gas and coal prices. (I'm not saying that nuclear power's a great thing, but I'm just saying it was a remarkably knee-jerk reaction for a huge country)

...

And Merkel's faced with an electoral tight-rope act to deal with at home all the time.

I think there's a bigger risk now that Germany's industrial powerhouse might get eclipsed by China and a resurging Japan (things are starting to wake up there due to economic policy changes)...

Couple that with mismanagement of the EZ and German inflexibility and it's bad for everyone including Germany.

Priority #1 at the moment should be re-floating the European economy, not protecting German inflation.

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I agree the Eurozone has huge problems, but I don't agree it's the cause of everything in Ireland. It was absolutely an accelerant and a facilitator of what happened here, but it didn't spark it - our own speculators did.
Bear in mind too that much of what happened here is also very similar to what happened in parts of the US - particularly states like Nevada that saw spectacular housing bubbles, and the sources of finance were similar too - derivatives.

The UK, (other than London) also saw a similar issues with a housing bubble and subsequent bust and its banks are also utter disaster zones in bailouts.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Because, despite what people think, the Germans are totally irrational about certain things.

Inflation - terror of it due to Weimar Republic hyper inflation days. Complete lack of ability to see that inflation may actually help in this situation.
Nuclear power - effectively shut down their nuclear power plants without any idea what they were going to do to provide energy and have caused a CO2 spike + major increase in gas and coal prices. (I'm not saying that nuclear power's a great thing, but I'm just saying it was a remarkably knee-jerk reaction for a huge country)

...

And Merkel's faced with an electoral tight-rope act to deal with at home all the time.

I think there's a bigger risk now that Germany's industrial powerhouse might get eclipsed by China and a resurging Japan (things are starting to wake up there due to economic policy changes)...

Couple that with mismanagement of the EZ and German inflexibility and it's bad for everyone including Germany.

We're heading towards deflation. What is more likely:
1: Germany is scared of inflation, even to the point of risking deflation - something all economists know is extremely harmful as it leads to a deflationary spiral
2: Germany is at an economic advantage, by the Euro practically being tailor-made to work in favour of Germany, and by the crisis holding back all others EU countries economic activity more than Germanies, allowing Germany a massive advantage over the rest of Europe - which they want to keep.

I'm not saying that's what the motive of Germany's government is, but it sure as hell makes a lot more sense, than a silly fear of inflation - to the point of allowing deflation.

That inflation fear is just a total myth really. Germany literally printed money during WWII, using MEFO bills, which funded their rearmament and built their massive war machine - they got over their fear of inflation pretty fast...

The Germans are actually that fearful of inflation.
They had a very long period of relative price stability and quite tight management of inflation after WWII and they'd argue that it's what made Germany strong.

I'd argue that Germany's strength was actually the fact that it had huge industrial capabilities and a long-standing culture of engineering and technology that put it back into good form very quickly after WWII despite having being flattened and that their inflation control policies may have had little to do with their success at all. They actually had a huge amount of stuff to export and a market that was willing to buy it all over the world.

If anything Germans totally overstate their economic policies in their success story - it was almost totally about industry and tech.

Ireland on the other hand had a period of very steep inflation after WWII (in exact line with the UK).

So, the mentality here was : buy something you can barely afford (house at some crazy price) ... mortgage to your back teeth and within 10-20 years you'll have a tiny mortgage and a big pot of cash as it'll have been inflated away.

That has been the history here and that's what most of our parents and possibly even grandparents (if they were buying property in the 1950s-60s) saw.

So, for Irish speculators, the bubble seemed normal.

The reality was the rules had changed and we got Irish / British prices and mentality with German low inflation and low interest!