April 2013 Archives

Will we ever see a report on the Irish banks like the UK's recent parliamentary report on HBOS?  Its  chapter headings read like a thriller - "The best board I ever sat on", "The price of failure", "Conclusion - a manual for bad banking".
 
I don't think the establishment has the stomach for a "full blooded" inquiry which would make the DIRT inquiry look like a picnic. As an alternative, our politicians could get a copy of the HBOS report and simply do a quick search/replace of names, places and dates as I suspect that the findings and conclusions could be left unchanged.

Letter published in the Irish Times on 15th April 2013.

Reports that AIB is planning to sell a €200 million loan portfolio beg the question as to why taxpayer-owned and foreign-owned banks are selling huge blocks of loans at discounts as high as 70 per cent and crystallising losses amounting to billions while resisting any similar broad-based write-downs of seriously distressed home mortgages. 

These discounts are additional to the €40 billion taxpayer-funded losses realised when developer loans transferred to Nama at a huge discount. Surely, to be consistent and fair, the covered banks should be required to offer write-downs to all very distressed mortgage holders especially given that they have already been fully funded by taxpayers to do so?

Letter published in the Sunday Business Post on 31st March 2013.