Non-fiction - Banksters: How a Powerful Elite Squandered Ireland's Wealth

[Joanne98]

Storm-watchers get tired of pointing out that, contrary to popular myth, the worst time to inspect the damage wrought by a hurricane is when the eye is passing over and all seems calm. For this is the time when the most violent winds are forming and it's best not to leave your shelter. As the biggest financial storm since 1929 continues to barrel its way across the globe, such meteorological advice may have a wider application, even for authors trying to track the destructive tempest that is the global credit crunch.




In Ireland, the storm-chasers of the past year have been financial journalists, catapulted from the relative obscurity of the business pages to national prominence. They've been asked to explain, interpret, decipher and ultimately rationalise events they have never seen before. This need to bring some kind of 'perspective' to the complex events of the past 21 months is now exhibiting itself in the world of book publishing.




Banksters, by RTE reporter David Murphy and newspaper columnist Martina Devlin, is the first of several books likely to be published on the subject of Ireland's financial crisis. Senator Shane Ross is entering the fray later this year with another tome on those dastardly bankers who, we're told, caused the entire mess.




Murphy and Devlin are at least not trying to be definitive. They begin with the bank guarantee scheme, agreed on the night of 29 September 2008, and run through the scandals that hit banking in the wake of that once-in-a-generation decision by Brians Cowen and Lenihan.




This is a bright, breezy read and rolls along at a decent clip, but there's a lingering sense that it may have been published a few months too early. For example, inside my copy was a slip of paper containing a clarification in relation to businessman Ulick McEvaddy and ex-Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick. At the time of writing, the biggest decision of them all – Nama – is still being debated and the banks are still inching dangerously close to nationalisation, giving a sense that the eye of the storm has definitely not passed. National bankruptcy, Iceland-style, while hugely unlikely, still cannot be entirely ruled out.




If that's how things end up, the book's authors are clear about who to blame – a small coterie of bankers and property developers who imposed a form of "turbo capitalism"' on a country still infected by the inferiority complexes of the 1970s and '80s. Put simply, houses in Ireland were selling for more than they were in Beverly Hills and nobody wanted to shout stop.



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http://www.tribune.ie/article/2009/may/31/non-fiction-banksters-how-a-powerful-elite-squande/