Stating the Hard Truth the Truthful Way

Irish banking collapse caused by greed and complicit public – report | Business | The Guardian: "Bankers taking risks on a 'almost unbelievable' scale, a complicit public willing to 'let the good times roll' and a lack of regulation combined to cause the collapse of the Irish banking system, a government-commissioned report concludes.

A nine-month inquiry by Finnish finance expert Peter Nyberg published is scathing about the banks which, he says, lost control, but also contains criticism of Irish society in general and institutions including the civil service and regulatory authorities.

Nyberg, a former International Monetary Fund economist, says that no one in the banks appreciated the risks being run and, that although global events did not help, the main reason for the Irish banking collapse was 'the unhindered expansion of the property bubble financed by banks using wholesale market funding'.

"It appears now, with hindsight, to be almost unbelievable that intelligent professionals appear not have been aware of the size of the risk they were taking," as they piled money into property pipedreams with little regard for risk analysis or even loan documentation, he says in the 156-page report commissioned by former finance minister Brian Lenihan.

There was, he says, an "inability and unwillingness to remember basic principles of banking" that providing credit is not a sale, "it is the acquisition of a risky asset".The public was also complicit, he says, because "large parts of Irish society were willing to let the good times roll"...."