The nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank is an indication of the abject failure of the Fianna Fail and Green government to deal with the banking crisis, but also that the crisis has reached a new and dangerous level. In the wake of the nationalisation, the shares of the two main banks, Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and Bank of Ireland (B of I), plummeted.
In Part two of a three part article on the Irish economy, Paul Murphy looks at some of the factors depressing the domestic economy, focusing on debt and unemployment, as well as analysing whether the government's export focused strategy can be successful.
Thursday, 4 August was a black day on world stock exchanges. In New York, the Dow Jones index fell by 4.3 per cent and the Nasdaq index closed down 5.3 per cent "and all the gains that have occurred since year end were deleted to zero" (as the financial website E24 said, 5 August). "It was an outright massacre," said John Richard, head of strategy at RBS Global Banking & Markets, to the Wall Street Journal about yesterday’s events.
The disgracefully nominal amounts of corporation tax being paid by some of the largest multinationals (MNCs) based in Ireland have come to the forefront of the news in recent months. The right-wing rag The Irish Independent even has had to adopt headlines such as “Google chief: 'I'm proud of tax we pay – it's called capitalism” such has been the incredibleness of the figures.
