3 Comments so far

• SeanR // Feb 18, 2009 at 11:33

  Will the last member of the Golden Circle, please come to the Departure Gate… come out, come out, wherever you are!! Rotten to the core, no – more than that – this stuff is surely treason against the State.

• Donal // Feb 18, 2009 at 13:13

  While I’d agree that the Irish banking sector has been too cosy for many many years and should have seen a lot of this coming, I think that there are still a lot of unknowns right now.

  I think there is a attitude in the general public that the debt black hole needs to be determined right now to see how deep it goes. This isn’t possible right now as a good deal of these debt failures haven’t happened yet and their sources are spread throughout the world in the global financial mess.

  I see this problem in relation to insurance. Years ago, when insurance companies were writing employers’ liability insurance, they didn’t realise that asbestos caused cancer. When the asbestos claims started to come in, it was impossible to accurately estimate the impact as this had never happened before. It took time to able to produce accurate estimates and even then they were just estimates as it was a long-term problem.

  So yes, there needs to sweeping changes in the banking community but the size of the debt black hole will still not be possible to estimate accurately.

• peter smyth // Feb 22, 2009 at 12:15

  You’ll find four of the ten identified in today’s Sunday Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5781014.ece