A new book edited by Brian Lucey, Charles Larkin and Constantin Gurdgiev has just been published by Orpen Press. Details of the book are available from Orpen Press, Amazon Kindle and others.
The book was formally launched last night in The Library Long Room in Trinity College by Senator Sean Barrett, whose speech is available here. Here is a short extract:
In the words of a great TCD man, Oscar Wilde, Miss Prism tells Cecily to read her political economy in the absence of her tutor. “The chapter on the fall of the rouble you may omit. These monetary problems have their melodramatic side.”
Ireland’s economic policy unfortunately followed Miss Prism’s advice. We sleepwalked into the euro currency and the regulatory body played lots of golf with bankers through an unsustainable property boom. Stephen Kinsella notes that we doubled the national debt in 2008 by bailing out the banks. Relative to GNP this was a gold medal in regulatory capture by world standards. Regulatory capture of governments by national airlines or sheltered sector professions pales into insignificance compared to the Irish bank capture of the exchequer.