

Q&A: Michael Lewis on the Politicians That Sank Ireland - tptacek
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/02/michael-lewis.html

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tptacek
The actual VF piece for this was posted weeks ago, but languishes; we'd rather
yell at each other about Apple than read about the collapse of the economy in
one of the world's major technical centers.

~~~
alecco
for the lazy

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179268>

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tokenadult
"It may be that 20 years from now we’re all laughing about what fools we were
for thinking China was such a threat. I don’t believe that the Chinese
political system can sustain a really successful economy. There’s going to
have to be a political revolution there before they’re competitive with us.
But what do I know?"

I think Lewis nails this.

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brc
That's an excellent piece of writing. Hopefully wide dissemination of pieces
like this will start to put paid to the idea of 'too big to fail' and the idea
that a government should underwrite a banks losses. That sort of thing kills
long term growth and endenders moral hazard the next time a boom comes around.

~~~
po
New rule: governments shouldn't ask for advice about what to do in a banking
crisis from a company who owns a ton of bonds in those banks. The conflict of
interest and lack of accountability is astounding. Politics suck: you're in
charge of a system you don't understand and the only people you can ask for
advice who do understand it are sitting at the same poker table. When you go
bust the public blames you as they suffer through austerity.

I also loved this quote from the story:

 _And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking
guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked._

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OliverM
Funny headline given the opening paragraphs point the blame at the bankers.
Really it was a small group of bankers, politicians and regulators that
crashed the country - backed up by a dis-interested electorate (until it was
too late).

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WildUtah
_backed up by a dis-interested electorate_

An uninterested electorate. They are discovering now that they were never
disinterested.

And they erred by being uninterested. I hope a lot of potentates will lose
their jobs and influence when the situation is rectified.

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iwwr
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fianna_Fáil>

At first I thought that name was some sort of joke.

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SteveC
The 'Fáil' part is pronounced as 'fall'.

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brc
Fall is hardly a better ending than fail. Neither are particularly inspiring!

Edit : I read the article. Apparently the pronunciation is 'foil'. Slightly
better.

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barrkel
A closer approximation would be "Faw-ill", emphasis on first "syllable", but
as a diphthong sound that almost ends up sounding like a shortened "eel". In
other words, the "a" sound starts out sounding like it does in "fall", but
ends up a hair away from "e" in "eel".

That's how I'd say it with a Gaeltacht accent in Galway. People who learned
Irish from a non-native speaker or a different area of the country will
probably disagree.

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merkel
I live in Ireland and passed around Michael Lewis' original Vanity Fair piece
(link below) to friends and family, the majority of whom were in awe of the
depth and breadth of insight in this article. There was a consensus of
disbelief that someone who was not Irish could, in such a short space of time,
grasp so many subtleties about the Irish situation, not just economically but
culturally, and with insights about figures in Irish politics that were
extremely revealing (e.g. Brian Lenihan). I feel this is a remarkable piece of
writing that far exceeds anything that has been written about the crisis by
Irish journalists themselves:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-
lewis-ireland-201103?printable=true)

~~~
thailandstartup
It's a great article and brings a lot of clarity to the events. He squarely
lays the blame with Brian Lenihan - ("A single decision sank Ireland") - but I
can't imagine the decision to guarantee the bondholders was his alone.

Also the bus was already in the ditch at that point - that decision helped
make matter worse, but there was no soft landing possible at that point.

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kjhgfhjkhgfv
This might be the best thing that ever happened to Ireland.

Since independance it has operated like a corrupt african regime. There were
elections but the same party was always in power. The politician's job was to
go off to Dublin and get money for their local area. This used to be european
handouts when Ireland was the poor relative - all over Ireland there are huge
freeway projects that go from nowhere to nowhere just because one county got a
grant.

Then it managed to attract a few US corporations to HQ there to avoid paying
tax in the UK or Germany - it then managed to convince itself that this made
it a celtic tiger. Rather like Liberia deciding it's a great naval power
because of the number of oil tankers registered there.

With a bit of luck we will now get real elections, a real economy and a chance
to become a real european country

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thailandstartup
You have a point - there was a large minority in the country ~30% that would
always vote Fianna Fail, no matter how corrupt they were revealed to be.
That's changed in the past year or two, so they are down to ~12% now and
expected to get wiped out in the forthcoming election. Ireland may have learnt
that it can't continue to elect corrupt representatives.

