Not Lying - Dreaming

Colm McCarthy thinks that he has discovered an episode of "moral hazard" (though he does not use that phrase) in the last pre-nationalisation days of Anglo-Irish Bank. I am not sure that he's correct - but I do agree that it merits investigation.

The sad reality, it seems to me, is that Colm's observation

... after end-September 2008...there could have been no plausible expectation of profits to shelter

is not correct. No-one at the top levels of Irish bank management took on board the reality of the profit position for quite some time after that. Remember the PWC report (two months later) ?

Even sadder, I strongly suspect that there are - even now - quite a few at such levels who are "in denial", at least to the extent of still clinging to the delusion that, without the external shock of Lehman Brothers' collapse and internal "talkers-down of the economy", a "soft landing" was in prospect.

It is all too plausible, I fear, that those who generate at least some of the allegedly misleading data about which NAMA claims to be irritated are the same people. They are not mendacious, as is constantly but, in my opinion, too glibly alleged. They are delusional.

Of course, such people should have been - firmly, and politely ! - shown the door long ago.

The Myth of the Rational Investor

Or, Why the Poor Capitalists Got Suckered (again)

Commenter on this website "Longman Oz" has a website of his own. Ostensibly dedicated to material of a more "cultural" nature, he has been unable to resist the lure of commenting on current economic travails, and has written a very readable account of how the banking crisis took the form it did this time (there will probably always be banking crises, and they will take different forms every time).

Read my own comment on the website too, and I hope that Bryan Caplan is reading this.

In "Liars Poker", a factual account of life inside a Wall Street investment bank, and even in the fictional "Bonfire of the Vanities", both widely read roughly two decades ago, the gullibility of those managing investment funds was depicted. Anecdotally, my recollection is that everyone accepted that the picture was accurate. The phenomena described by Longman Oz were just a further development of the madness already well under way.

Why did investors not shout "stop" ?