They are absolutely right. In the US and many other countries, despite the banks causing the crisis, it has been everyone else who has had to fund the bailout and slow recovery. Even today, the QE2 program is all about helping the banks boost their liquidity rather than helping the Americans who lost their jobs because of the economic crisis. The banks and the bankers should be much more responsible for the financial recovery. In addition, people like Greenspan and the entire Federal Reserve deserve much more responsibility for ignoring what they had to know was a growing problem.
John Bruton, premier in the 1994-97 centre-right, Fine Gael-led coalition, on Monday accused British, German, Belgian and French banks of “irresponsible lending... in the hope that they too could profit from the Irish construction bubble.” Mr Bruton said in a speech to the London School of Economics that banks had “lots of information available to them about spiraling house prices in Ireland”.
They were supervised by their national central banks and by the ECB which “seemingly raised no objection to this lending.”
Burden-sharing – the notion that European banks and bondholders should share with Irish taxpayers the cost of restructuring Ireland’s broken financial system – is likely to be a key demand of the new Irish government as it seeks easier terms on a €85 billion bail-out provided by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. A joint coalition program, agreed by Fine Gael and Labour at the weekend, said the new government “secured a strong mandate from the Irish electorate to renegotiate a more credible package that is better for both Ireland and Europe”.
