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How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger
PublicAffairs
March 2010
On Sale: March 2, 2010
240 pages
ISBN: 1586488813
EAN: 9781586488819
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The most spectacular bust of the global financial crisis was
not the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers or the near-collapse
of AIG but the demise of the entire economy of Ireland. Ship of Fools, a gripping financial morality tale, is both a
coruscating analysis of the habits of the last decade and a
warning for all time. The death of the Celtic tiger is not
an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in
fact, nothing natural about this tiger. The 'Irish Economic
miracle' was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the
European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s
Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so
economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American
averages, the boom lured in investors, the Irish government
deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a
great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash
of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere.
Among the avalanche of statistics - as toxic as the
property-based assets that lay beneath many of them - none
was more revealing than that Ireland's bad bank, the
National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) held more
(worthless) assets than any publicly quoted property company
in the world, dwarfing giants such as GE Capital Real Estate
and Morgan Stanley Real Estate. Under all the debris lay the
corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion
is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness, and
venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's
most respected journalists and commentators.
Comments
2 comments posted.
Re: Ship Of Fools
Sounds awesome! Please sign me up!
(MaryAnne Banks 10:57am March 27, 2010)
She's gone country is an Alan Jacfkson song which I love and I'm hoping the book is as good
(MaryEllen Hanneman 12:33pm September 12, 2010)
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