It's an Irish default really (shhhhhhhh), at a time
when we are all supposed to think we have 'turned a corner' into recovery. Ah
well, what else is new. This is pretty standard fare for this wintry time of year.
It is confusing as to who the bondholders
really are, Henry McDonald (Guardian) suggests to us it is 'Anglo Irish
bondholders', but who are they, are they not now the Irish Central Bank which
nationalized Anglo (and is now called a different name)? I think it is the
Irish Central Bank repaying its own promissory note (via vehicles) and now
trying to restructure it (Greece did similar a while back - a default too). And who wrote the onerous terms on the note? One
supposes the ECB. So if the ECB has agreed to restructure the liability (it isn't saying much but something is going on), it is
pretty near to directly financing the Irish state and reneging on its hallowed mission
(to control inflation).
Yes, if every country in the eurozone were allowed similarly to
print off tens of billions of euro (around 40bn in this case) and put
them into insolvent banks the result would be chaos, but Ireland's role in euro-crisis
'management' spin is different to Greece, since we are seeing here bailouts of rather obvious private misdeeds and corruption, and not essentially the 'socialist' state,
while for Greece the rightist spin can have it the other way: for the EZ
mainstream ideology it is the 'socialist state' that's the overall problem, and its democratic electors, and Greece
is the main example and whipping boy.
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