Looked at in another light, the first recommendation above codifies a fire-sale for bankrupt banks. Given the fractional reserve nature of our banking system, it would be relatively easy to predatorily cause a “bank run” on an Irish bank that would allow a bridge bank (read as: a temporary bank controlled by international bank interests) to pick up the assets for cents on the euro. This is not a good thing for Ireland.

Similarly, the second recommendation, “expense reduction”, could be anything. I’d prefer the decision of what gets cut to be decided by *our* politicians, who are at least answerable to us through elections, rather than by a liberal / neocon washington-based group who don’t really care about the Irish electorate. Recommendations for privatization would ultimately put control of Irish utilities in international investors, who demonstrably care about nothing more than maximizing (& re-patriating!) profit. Full stop.

In the past, the IMF has imposed water privitization on 12 countries which *always* results in higher costs to consumers, and even tried to privatize rainwater collection in Bolivia!!! When the Bolivian people revolted, Bechtel (the US company awarded the water rights) sued the Bolivian government for $25 million. This figure was far in excess of what Bechtel had invested in Bolivia but they sued for lost “projected profits” from the water monopoly.

Is this really the kind of “help” we need in this country???

http://www.economicshelp.org/2008/11/criticism-of-imf.html
http://www.50years.org/cms/ejn/story/85

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73f524ca-4faa-11de-a692-00144feabdc0.html

http://193.120.95.144/politics/design-for-democracy.pdf

Those responsible (Elaine Byrne, Matt Wall and Jane Suiter) for the Irish Political Reform Conference in TCD on Monday 22 June 2009, were kind enough to post one paper and links to three other papers here

http://irishpoliticalreform.wordpress.com/donal-obrolchain-paper/

the thinking was explicitly focused on how we govern ourselves, which is wider than what I understand this site prefers to focus on.

- Lack of political oversight (see political reform post)
- Too big to fail (see post linkin Willem Buiter)
- Too complex to exist http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/06/14/too_complex_to_exist/?page=full
- Animal spirits, behavioural economics, the myth of Econ-man (aka the stupidity of humans) [Thaler, Shiller etc]
- Failures of regulation
- Derivatives et al

We need systems that we can regulate, that people of average intelligence can understand, which democratic institutions can oversee and make accountable, which are not too big to fail, which are not too interlinked and which are based on real industry.

But, this is the second time that the country has been brought to the precipice in my adult lifetime, and so there is surely a case to be made that we need some sort of institutional reform. Different electoral system? A second republic? New relationships between government ministries? I don’t know what the solution is but something has got to change.

It would be nice if we could introduce laws that made everyone do the right thing all the time. If only government was so simple.

Where would we be with a statutory fiscal rule that only allowed deficits of 5%? Would most of the contributors to this site be out of a job? This strikes me as a crazy idea in the context of a country subject to the vicissitudes of a global economy beyond its control.

The question must also be asked whether the IMF would like such rules to be granted the status of international law further down the line?
Monetary systems and economic systems are abstract tools for the operation of civil society. They must be adjusted to match the reality of a world undergoing huge physical and scientific changes. To put legal barriers in the way of such adjustments makes no sense, especially when we are told that the only thing that has saved us from another great depression now has been the nimbleness of States in reacting to the problems.