Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis has a fantastic, captivating piece on the Irish econopocalypse in the new Vanity Fair. Lewis ranges freely from slice-of-life observations about Dublin as a city occupied by foreign management consultants trying to figure out what to do with the disastrous worst-of-the-worst banks, to the history of the Celtic Tiger economy, to the ebb and tide of Polish workers in Ireland as an economic indicator, to the incredible and bizarre housing boom that, inevitably, turned into a world-class bust. It's vintage Lewis, gripping, savage, illuminating:
Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers set some kind of record for destruction. Theo Phanos, a London hedge-fund manager with interests in Ireland, says that "Anglo Irish was probably the world's worst bank. Even worse than the Icelandic banks."
Ireland's financial disaster shared some things with Iceland's. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives' suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places–trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia–the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
(Image: Budget Day In Dublin – Useless Gobshites, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from infomatique's photostream)
