The news that zombie bank AIB, kept afloat at huge expense to taxpayers, is to award it’s employees a 3% pay rise marks a truly shocking departure from reality. The move undermines the government, at a time when they appear to be softening up public sector workers about the need for them to take pay cuts and possibly face redundancies. How angry must they feel when banking executives, working in the sector that did most damage to the export-led Celtic Tiger economy, flaunt their freedom to waste tax payers money in such a manner?
Capitalism requires that the competent take over from the incompetent. Business processes in the new 26-county Socialist Republic of NAMAland seem to be taking a bizarre turn for the worse. The incompetent are not only able to hold onto their jobs and companies their market share – at the expense of competent banks, those in other industries their imprudence has decimated, and tax payers generally – but they are able to misappropriate the taxes of future generations to reward their incompetence today.
If we must persist with what appears to be the globally unique experiment that is NAMA (did we learn nothing from being the only country to guarantee the entire liabilities of our banks? Why do we think we are so special?), I have one question –
With reference to what happened in the tech industry during the dot.com bust, and to what is happening in construction today – when does the clear out begin and the redundancies start?
No bio, some books worth reading – The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves – Matt Ridley .
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance -Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm
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