Un Mirroir Irlandais par Paul Krugman

[guerby]

Source : NY Times
Date : 7 mars 2010
Auteur : Paul Krugman
Titre : An Irish Mirror
Lien : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opini ... ugman.html

(...) So let’s talk about Ireland.

As a new research paper by the Irish economists Gregory Connor, Thomas Flavin and Brian O’Kelly points out, “Almost all the apparent causal factors of the U.S. crisis are missing in the Irish case,” and vice versa. Yet the shape of Ireland’s crisis was very similar: a huge real estate bubble — prices rose more in Dublin than in Los Angeles or Miami — followed by a severe banking bust that was contained only via an expensive bailout.

Ireland had none of the American right’s favorite villains: there was no Community Reinvestment Act, no Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. More surprising, perhaps, was the unimportance of exotic finance: Ireland’s bust wasn’t a tale of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps; it was an old-fashioned, plain-vanilla case of excess, in which banks made big loans to questionable borrowers, and taxpayers ended up holding the bag.

So what did we have in common? The authors of the new study suggest four “ ‘deep’ causal factors.”

First, there was irrational exuberance: in both countries buyers and lenders convinced themselves that real estate prices, although sky-high by historical standards, would continue to rise. (...)

Une comparaison entre la crise dans divers pays avec comme premier facteur identifié : la croyance des acheteurs et préteurs que les prix de l'immobilier, déja stratosphériques historiquement, continueraient toujours a monter.

[neron]

+1000. La raison de cette bulle n'est pas les subprimes, ni la pénurie ... mais une volonté politique qui a pris différente forme suivant les pays. Il n'y a que voir l'énergie et les sous qu'ils mettent aujourd'hui pour défendre le prix des actifs immobiliers. Quelques soit le pays !! alors que le roi est nu

[guerby]

+1000. La raison de cette bulle n'est pas les subprimes, ni la pénurie ... mais une volonté politique qui a pris différente forme suivant les pays. Il n'y a que voir l'énergie et les sous qu'ils mettent aujourd'hui pour défendre le prix des actifs immobiliers. Quelques soit le pays !! alors que le roi est nu

Oui, d'ailleurs Paul Krugman enfonce le clou :

But the most striking similarity between Ireland and America was “regulatory imprudence”: the people charged with keeping banks safe didn’t do their jobs. In Ireland, regulators looked the other way in part because the country was trying to attract foreign business, in part because of cronyism: bankers and property developers had close ties to the ruling party.

There was a lot of that here too, but the bigger issue was ideology. Actually, the authors of the Irish paper get this wrong, stressing the way U.S. politicians celebrated the ideal of homeownership; yes, they made speeches along those lines, but this didn’t have much effect on lenders’ incentives.

What really mattered was free-market fundamentalism. This is what led Ronald Reagan to declare that deregulation would solve the problems of thrift institutions — the actual result was huge losses, followed by a gigantic taxpayer bailout — and Alan Greenspan to insist that the proliferation of derivatives had actually strengthened the financial system. It was largely thanks to this ideology that regulators ignored the mounting risks.

Discotonio sors de ce corps !