Predicting fate of Ireland turns into a shouting match

Here is the International Herald Tribune’s description of the local debate.

Update: The New York Times gives the same article a different headline: “Ireland? Iceland? Doubts on Doomsday Scenario in Eire“

5 replies on “Predicting fate of Ireland turns into a shouting match”

Wow Philip. Brilliant — where in god’s name do you find this stuff?

“Known in Ireland as Dr. Doom, Kelly, whose eyes burn with the passionate intensity of his prophesy, calls himself the Nouriel Roubini of Ireland, a nod to the New York University economist who was one of a handful of experts who predicted the credit collapse.”

Can anyone tell me have they ever heard Morgan referred to in Ireland as Dr. Doom? And the idea that he goes around calling himself “the Nouriel Roubini of Ireland” (like more than a handful of people would know what that means) does Morgan a disservice. Moral of the the story: Don’t have coffee with people from the Herald Tribune.

More seriously, a quick look at the Anglo report shows that most of the derivatives are pretty plain-vanilla things like interest rate swaps. I’m not enough of an expert to know whether there are serious bodies buried here or not but I’d like to hear more from those who know more about these things.

Also the title seems to be ripped out of thin air. Who is shouting at Prof. Kelly exactly? The only shouting, as far as I know, is happening on the Dail floor, but that is business as usual.

For the record, the 20% of income figure the New York Times journalist assigns to me comes from something like “Even if the loan losses were twice what Goodbody Stockbrokers have forecast, that would leave the Government with a net bill of well under 20% of GDP”.

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