My Banking Inquiry….

We may not get the banking inquiry we want, but we may have a on the horizon a court case that will suffice to draw up the elements of what a court case that would bring most of the information we want from such an inquiry. Apparently legal action around the Quinn family’s case against Anglo(IBRC) is to focus on the role of the banking regulator, the Department of Finance, the government, the ECB and the Irish Central Bank,  in the demise of Anglo. The Quinn family are out to prove that incompetence, political interference and corruption of Anglo due to malpractice of the above institutional players will reward them with a massive compensation claim.

Perhaps taxpayers can take the above wave and surf it to deny the intent of the ECB to odiously stick Irish taxpayers with the debts of the rogue bank Anglo.

This issue is the greatest issue faced by government in Ireland. It is also the greatest issue of denial by government in Ireland. Smoke and mirrors from government have successively broken claims of movement on this. Successive postponements, cancellations and kicking the can into the future blurred by peacocking efforts on behalf of Enda Kenny and Michael Noonan have yielded zero.

Enda Kenny continues pleading with ECB and troika to send him a signal that there will be movement on Anglo promissory notes, but hitherto his efforts have paled against the IMF who’ve made a greater effort on Ireland’s part to resolve the issue. The next installment of €3.1 bn with similar due for approx the next decade, is due March 2013. We were due to pay €3.1bn last year but got payment deferred to this year where we’re due to pay up €6.2 bn for the rogue joke Anglo.Well, actually, they said we didn’t pay, but we did. Nama issued a bond and it was routed through a bank and like all NAMA property deals they’ll probably argue we’ll make a profit on this though it cost us €3.1 bn. Before Xmas Enda Kenny said a deal was imminent and we were expecting (well, not this writer) a deal which as usual never came. We’ll see who pays in March.

We should simply refuse to pay and refuse to stay in a euro which is dragging this country beneath the waves. Political failure is masked by lack of progress and denial and ‘green shoots’ where none grow. Some did quite well out of the famine and they will do quite well out of Ireland’s austerity regime.

Since all leaks into our banks have been plugged by dressed up pseudo cover-up banking inquiries or been plugged by insider so-called public interest directors exposed this week as ineffective, answerable to no one, bloated on their fees and apparently joined at the hip with the bankers they were meant to police, lets have a go here at a banking inquiry of our own. Lets say we want some practice for the real thing in the dock of the courts to come.

Concealment of the finances that led to Peter Madoff(1) getting 10 yrs for his role in the Madoff ponzi scheme in a just and fair society in Ireland would see replicated similar trials re eg  B&B loan breakfasting etc. But lets not anticipate the outcome of the courts or even the possibility of such cases. Lets rather look at some evidence that should lead to the courts. You want to know how bank share prices could have been manipulated by such lending practices, what senior directors got by way of share options and bonuses?

In a foreword to Ellen Browne’s book, “The Web of Debt”, Ellen Hodgson Browne, Revised and updated Jan 2012, http://www.webofdebt.com/

“A common practice is for loan officers to ignore the long-term risk of loans and approve those loan transactions with the highest fees and interest paid immediately– income which can be distributed to the principal executives of the bank. Such distribution is buried within the bank’s owner/manager compensation and is distributed to the principal owners as dividends and stock options. That helps explain why, in my home state of Kansas,a major bank in Topeka was run into bankruptcy after its chairman entered into a development and construction loan involving a mortgaged 5,000 acre residential development tract in the “exurbs” far outside of Houston, Texas. The development included curbs, gutters, pavement, street lighting, water, sewer, electricity – everything but homes and families! If the loan had been metered out in small phases to match market absorption, the chairman of that once-fine institution would not have been able to disburse to himself and his friends the enormous up-front loan fees and interest owing to that specific transaction, or to the many loans he made just like it. During the 1980s, developers from across the country beat a path to sleepy Topeka and other areas sporting similar financial institutions, just to have a chance to dance with these corrupt lenders. The managers and developers got rich, leaving the banks’ shareholders and the taxpayers to pay the bill.”

Does the above sound familiar? Right, you want to go around the ghost estates and find out how they got their loans? Who dealt with what? Planning permission, bank lending practices, who negotiated what? Because you believe some white collar crime might be involved?

(1)http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/20/news/companies/peter-madoff-sentencing/

Meanwhile we are coddled by false statistics understating our unemployment levels that fail to take in the massive emigration and the destruction of the domestic economy.

Denial is the norm along with dismantling our educational service by removing allowances for extra qualifications gained through the intelligence and initiative of young people deepening their intellectual qualifications is now the new ‘smart economy’. Inequality is the norm where initiative goes unrewarded and political incompetence is the new norm.

Happy 2013 to all.

End.

The Bailiffs Part 11

This post is a follow-on from The Bailiffs previous post. I thought out of my respect for scientific, empirical, objective nuance and my call for a banking inquiry based approach to these matters, I would add a little more to this topic.

Here’s one decisive article on this topic, to which I’ve added the online comment below.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/1213/1224327803116.html?via=mr

“Well done Vincent Martin. The more sane and rational voices we have to expose the massive deception foisted on Irish people, the better.

Hypocrisy calling for a public, sworn inquiry into Finucane report by Gilmore is matched only by FG/LB refusal to hold a public, sworn inquiry into our banks and this deception.

Britain has had its inquiry into the banks, the US set up its own inquiry into the banks and in one year with 19 public hearings and after examining millions of documents, produced a full book in January 2011, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. We are being told lies that a similar inquiry into our banking crisis and the decisions involved re promissory notes and the Irish banking guarantee(unprecedented in its lack of judgement), would take decades to complete?

How the erroneous cost of the banks through the guarantee was accounted for by decision makers has still not been revealed. We saw senior stooges in government with straight faces revise the cost exponentially over a 12 month period seeing the cost rise from €3bn to
€30 bn plus for Anglo alone while falsifying the view the Irish people were liable for the massive gambling debts of gamblers and political cronies.

Why do we not already have a full Garda inquiry into the disappearance of logs on the decision re promissory notes and the foisting of this debt on Irish taxpayers?

There is something rotten being covered up and the feel good, honour your debts mantra of FG is an economic disaster with a dark side to it that should be exposed. Unfortunately, banking interests, Bruton, Spring, Sutherland are there to see this will not happen.

We need to refuse to pay the promissory notes. A full public, sworn inquiry to expose the precise relationships between the Central Bank of Ireland, Anglo Irish Bank, the ECB, Irish Department of Finance and Irish politicians, that led to this disaster is being denied us to prevent answers to these questions coming out.

Not only should we not pay the promissory notes, but we should also have a public, sworn inquiry into their origin in our banking crisis.

The Irish people could use the outcome of such an inquiry to vindicate their right not to pay these illegal promissory notes. Precisely because such an inquiry would likely expose the incompetence and cronyism that led to this economic disaster that continues to this day, is reason enough for them not to hold such an inquiry and find and write-up those logs! ”

To put some more flesh on the above I have Tom Lyons of the Irish Times to thank for his article, Nov 11, Business, “Fatal Guarantee by Finance was ‘ heroic ‘: Hurley ..Central Bank boss backed political masters to the hilt”

Sure, if you believe the Charge of the Light Brigade was ‘ heroic’.

“John Hurley, Central Bank boss figures in Department of Finance ‘has finally released the documents following a two-year Freedom of Information on the release of key interviews with the Wright Commission in Sept 2010 as part of its probe into why the department failed to prevent, act or manage the financial crisis properly.”

“The Department of Finance refused to release Hurley’s interview and others on so-called public interest  grounds.”

Apparently no records exist to give the bread crumb trail we need to see Cowen led FF involvement in the Central Bank balance sheet ending in the disastrous guarantee.

The Information Commission rejected the position put forward by the Department of Finance. Department of Finance objected to release of information on grounds of  public interest  grounds. They should not be allowed to do this.

DOF have built Chinese walls to prevent the people seeing the truth. Every argument from protecting the right to privacy, to commercial sensitivity has been built to prevent public airing of the truth. 10 loans examined in public by IBRC with a commission empowered by real powers based on public interest, would reveal the hoax perpetrated on the democratic base upon this state is built.

One pernicious argument raised against such a commission quite apart from the arguments given above, is that it would persecute innocent individuals in a MCCarthyist draconian purge of innocence betrayed. We were all in this together, no individual has anything to answer!

The problem here is the state has failed the people and failed democracy. The judicial arm of the state has been corrupted and abused with arguments above that deny the accountability and responsibility to each individual in the state for their actions. Democracy has been set aside much in the way its set aside in a Stalinist dictatorship, a dictatorship of the banks, for the banks, by the banks.

End.

The Bailiffs

The budget of the bailiffs came this week. Further damage inflicted to the whole economy. It came in the wake of failure by Kenny and Gilmore to exact any debt forgiveness from the ECB. Occasionally we see the veil slipping. We saw it with the ‘fair budget’ mask reveal a 20% cut to the excellent people who save the state millions by tending to their loved ones in ways the state could never dream to. It was well they did not call it a ‘caring budget’ with cuts to carers being a major target of the troika’s axe.

Changes to pension pots have been marginal with many changes deferred to 2014 arguably the money in such funds untouchable and left to build up for recipients towards future reward. No harm in that but facts show the €26 million saved from carers is money that will not be spent in shops and will lose jobs. Across the board its the economic jugular of the economy that is being cut with the larger burden of the cuts being on middle-income Ireland, money that will take jobs out of the economy, no matter what they tell you to the contrary.

There were no similar cuts announced re the promissory note repayments of €3.1. This blog has previously called many times for the resignation of Professor Honahan of the Central Bank who is against the holding of a banking inquiry more detailed than he has provided. On the banking inquiry it’s all quiet on the western front in Ireland, the media have gone silent on calls for the same.

We need to get answers to the precise relationship between the CBI and the government and the IRBC (Anglo) from 2006 on to today.

“In a renegotiation, the Government should be seeking a complete write-down of the promissory note. This would require an innovative response from the CBI. We believe this will be done as the CBI has already accepted its critical role in the Anglo/IRBC debacle.”

http://www.progressive-economy.ie/2011/09/wiping-clean-angloinbs-debt-slate.html

We need to hear the progress of representatives of the government and the CBI and other interested parties eg Department of Finance in current debt negotiations.

Tom McDonnell, Michael Burke and Michael Taft write in the above:

“• In the next four years the cost of Anglo/IRBC debt will make up almost a third of all state borrowing.;
• The annual repayments will exceed the entire budget for the nation’s primary school system;
• The average annual repayment for just one year exceeds the entire cost for a next generation broadband network;
• The total cost is equivalent in scale to half of our GNP this year.”

Written over a year ago on Sep 20 2011 they called for

“The starting point should be a Government announcement this autumn that it does not intend to continue with the current promissory note payment schedule and will enter into renegotiation with the affected parties.”

For the past year instead we’ve been drip fed the mantra of deep, complex, hard negotiations with continuing deferrals of announcements following empty posturing by Enda Kenny and his failure to elicit any success on debt write down. We’ve waited long the fruits of the quiet diplomacy but the troika and Angela Merkel and european heads of government simply ignore Kenny and turn their back on debt relief for Ireland. The empty-headed approach of Fine Gael Labour has been rewarded with empty-handed indifference from Angela Merkel, the ECB and the troika.

Budget cuts are now cutting away at the muscle of Irish recovery. Fine Gael and Labour are now echoing the previous administrations mantra of Ireland on the cusp of economic recovery with salvation and recovery begun as we speak. This confidence trickery is the stuff of Irish propaganda.

But perhaps here it is incorrect to overemphasize the mendacity of Labour and Fine Gael at expense of recognition of the absence of bright individuals among both groups capable of dreaming up smart policies.

http://www.nationofchange.org/iceland-did-it-rightand-everyone-else-doing-it-wrong-1354283363

LB/FG have been converted to the beggar my neighbour malign belief that austerity will lead to jobs. Fine Gael are blue-collar bankers whose philosophy is that wealth must be preserved for the wealthy, that taxing wealth leads to loss of jobs. It’s difficult to believe that such Greenspan economics  laissez-faire attitudes are at the helm of our society having been discredited in our economic collapse, but such is the resourcefulness of the insider class in Ireland.

Finance Minister Anders Borg of Sweden has successfully introduced tax cuts to stimulate the Swedish economy. While Kenny and Gilmore increase taxation at every level to hoover everything up to the central bankers in Europe as a form of austerity reparations,

”

While the U.S. continues to struggle with its jobs problem — unemployment is at 8.1% here — Sweden’s jobless rate has fallen to 7.5%.

Not perfect, but 7.5% is far below the euro zone average of 10.2% and significantly lower than the rates in Spain (21.7%), Portugal (12.9%) and the United Kingdom (8%), countries that Borg noted were “… arguing for large temporary stimulus.”

Under Borg, Sweden handled the downturn in the most un-European way. “While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut,” Fraser Nelson wrote last month in the Spectator.

”
Read More At IBD: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/051112-611249-swedish-model-brings-economic-growth.htm#ixzz2EZChIhb3

Gilmore and Kenny by their austerity budget, their massive failure to achieve debt write down, their craven obedience to dictates imposed from abroad and filtered through a financial system in Ireland that is still pro deregulation, pro speculation, top-heavy with a political class creaming it with salaries and perks the envy of Europe, are taking Ireland on a path to ceaucescu economic ruin as they curry favour with their political, economic and financial masters.

Private banking interests seed the public arena with such figures as Kenny and Gilmore in order to protect their interests and to fight reform of a financial system that has failed all over Europe.

Its time in Ireland for a new LEUP ( Leave Euro Party ). A giant squid octopus of a budget has attached its suckers to middle Ireland destroying social and economic well-being in ways that could not have been imagined until now. The suckers hell-bent in pursuing such policies in Fine Gael and Labour are not the brightest tools in the box. Once again the Charge of the Light Brigade led by FG/LB has brought this country closer to economic ruin.

We need an inquiry into the banks looking in particular at the role of politicians and the Department of Finance and relationships between the Central Bank of Ireland and IBRC and the ECB. We need to know what the hell is going on re our debt renegotiation.

Of all the nasty ingredients in this budget, by far must be the treatment of those in negative equity. Instead of a write-down of their debt, the tens of thousands unable to pay their new property taxes, new Section 118 gives power to the taxman to deduct the property tax from any state payments to owner of the property might receive. If the property owner is unable to pay the odious tax and has to sell the property, the payments including arrears and penalties will be deducted at the point of sale of the property. They intend to cast debt onto the progeny.

Furthermore new  property tax measures penalise those living in Dublin through corresponding valuations higher than country-wide rates throughout regions in Ireland. Owners of second homes will be hit for second home taxes plus a tax on a non primary residence.

But this is a budget that will boost jobs and growth. Ceucescu politics of embarrassingly disastrous decision-making still goes on on Ireland’s titanic.

End.