71–76 of 76 posts
When will countries finally understand that it's better to co-operate them too compete against another? Multinational companies are playing them against each other.
Seems particularly apt in this context.
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Why is that odder than the Bank of England, which sets interest rates and is also technically outside of the political system.
Because the Bank of England controls the pound and everyone one who works for it are answerable to the electorate in one way or another. On the other hand a Eurozone member cannot set it's own interest rates, inflation, can't restructure it's own debt, doesn't control it's exchange rates etc. It takes away nearly all the financial tools a country has. Do you know why you need to bail out Ireland? because it doesn't h…
The head of the Bank of England is appointed by the UK government. The head of the ECB is appointed by the Council of ministers - ministerial representatives of member states. How is is this different, conceptually, in terms of answerability to the electorate?
The ECB sets interest rates independently, the BoE does the same.
Most of your arguments appear to be about the difficulties inherent in having a single monetary system across disparate economies, and I agree with you - but there is nothing inherently anti-democrat in the way that the ECB manages its affairs.
Amazon, facebook and Google should be fined also
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>they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago: You have that the wrong way around. The Irish taxpayers, unwillingly, covered the massive gambling losses of private individuals and companies(including a group of businesses called "banks") who were playing in the (German-lead US-style) light-touch bank de-regulation "bank-casinos" of Europe. The "casinos" in Ireland had a disproportionate…
I usually don't engage in this sort of trivial nationalism. But I just have to inject that your retelling of this story omits the fact that Irish banks were obviously first in line to go belly-up. It is true that those banks had various lenders in Germany/France/wherever, and that the consequences of an all-out collapse of the Irish economy would have had negative effects in those countries as well. But presenting it…
Thanks
Nothing about this is trivial.
This is not nationalism. There should be no pride in our creation or solution to our portion of this moronic mess.
The obvious was ommitted because it was obvious. The banks are only "Irish" in a nominal sense. The people or state as a whole didn't own them. Don't forget they are international commerical businesses and can and should be shut down when they fail like any other business.
Obviously they are a critical piece of modern infrastructure and there was already plans in place for their failure such as "deposit protection insurance" schemes etc. The big question is if those plans were/are robust enough in modern countries. We _all_ need to be able to confidentaly able to "cull" bad components of our modern infrastructure without fear of causing wider problems.
Nothing about it was altruistic. Fear and panic very obviously gripped the politicians involved on all sides.
As an interesting related historic aside, we survived reasonably well without our banks for 6 months previously when we were a much weaker economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_bank_strikes_%281966%E2%...
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> It's weird that the EU has a monetary union, but so much difference in corporate income tax rates. That's because it's a monetary union, not a fiscal union. > Great that IE is 12%, but this "competition" is BS in the sense that they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago: That's based on a severe misconception. The Irish headline rate is 12.5%, but the effective rate doesn't differ mu…
Moreover, Ireland was the fastest-recovering nation financial crisis, driven undoubtedly in part by its preferential corporate tax rates
So no, it wasn't.