What did the big bail out cost the poor tax payer.

Ireland total cost of the bailout to more than €70bn,

AIB will require an additional €13.3bn.

– Bank of Ireland will require €5.2bn.

– ESB will require €1.5bn.

– Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) will require €4bn.

UK government bailed the banks out to the tune of £123.93bn, and at its peak had liabilities for the banking crisis of £1.2 trillion.

Greece, 166 billion euros in bailout loans,

The USA taxpayers give them an astonishing $83bn subsidy every year.

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

The Fed paid $659.4 million in “fees” to these very same institutions during the period in question. This is not part of the bailout.

OK. So now we have the full picture, right? no wrong!

Officials at the European Commission confirmed plans for a new “financial instrument” based on an existing £42billion. At present, the fund – known as the Balance of Payment Facility – exists to provide emergency loans to non-eurozone EU nations. More than £9billion has already been lent to Latvia, ­Hungary and Romania. Now officials want to extend the scheme to include financial institutions such as banks. The fact is that many banks throughout Europe today have a zombie existence where they continue to exist, attempt to draw in savings, that they cannot get, by offering deposit rates, significantly below the rate of inflation, and live in an existence where they have money to pay staff but yet cannot afford to make loans to support businesses. The banks continue to trade, annually they must increase fees and yet they continue to record annual losses. Their losses are usually met by state guaranteed loans and those states seek daily to extricate themselves from their obligations to these banks.

The bailout enslaved us to the big banks more than ever before creating a “moral hazard”

Next time you hear someone say an independent Scotland could not have afforded the banking bail out, remember how the US Federal Reserve bailed out Barclay’s to the tune of £552.32bn.  It is a fact that the contribution of an independent Scotland’s taxpayers to any bank bail-out that may or may not have been required in an independent Scotland would have been the same as it has been with Scotland part of the UK.

Ask them if they think Scotland would have made the same bank regulation mistakes as the city of London led Westminster government?

In the case of Barclay’s, it fell to the US to support the bank because they were one of the single largest purchasers of US Government debt, so the problem was the US Government’s, not the UK taxpayer’s alone. The US intervened so that its debt market didn’t collapse and to prevent broader consequences for America’s economy and society.

The UK Government bail out of RBS and HBOS amounted to £65bn. That’s a lot of money, but the US Federal Reserve made emergency loans available to RBS of £285bn and to HBOS of £115bn.

The US bailed out these UK banks too, in the same way as Scottish taxpayers contributed to liquidity support for international banks based in London (including American ones).

The whole shindig was a redistribution of money from the poor to the rich.

Just Look at what a mere 25 billion could do.

Serious: Not Serious. 

Buy enough malaria nets to protect the entire malaria-affected population of the world (half a billion people) for 80 years (based on Nothing But Nets figures of $10 a net)

Completely fund the World Food Program for five years.

Repair twice over the damage done to Haiti in the recent earthquake.

Fund enough clean water and infrastructure projects to meet the millennium Development Goals.

Buy up and extinguish the national debt of Bangladesh.

Fund the UNESCO “Information for All” Project for 1200 years.

Provide food aid to Niger for 1000 years.

Asphalt every trunk and regional road (110,000km) of substandard road in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here is what they could have done with in Ireland.

Research & develop 5000 new drugs….one of em’s bound to be useful.

Construct 6 Large Hadron Colliders one all 7 green party TD

Build 5 James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble), and revolutionist astronomy.

Pay the interest on everyone’s mortgage for 4 years (€147bn of mortgages at 4% is €5.88bn a year)

Abolish income tax for two years (based on 2009 gov income tax receipts of €11.8bn)

Offer everyone on the live register €100,000 to emigrate (we could afford a 50% take-up by the 466,000 on the dole)

Fly the adult population of Ireland to Las Vegas, give everyone 10k to gamble with.

Abolish VAT for two and a half years (based on 2009 receipts of €10.8bn)

Remove excise duty from fuel, tobacco and alcohol until 2015 (based on excise receipts of €4.7bn a year)

Pay the grocery bills of everybody in the country for 2.5 years.

Give every person in the country €5,555.56

Buy half a million eco-friendly Nissan Leaf cars and have enough for a 5GW nuclear power station with the cash left over.

Provide a new laptop every year to every second level student for 147 years.

Buy a 32GB iPhone, a 64GB iPad, a 13″ 2.13GHz MacBook Air and a 27-inch iMac for every man, woman and child living in Ireland.

Buy a pint of Guinness for everyone in the world to celebrate Arthur’s Day (and it would count as exports)

Scrap all fares on all forms of public transport, intercity and commuter trains and buses for 33 years.

Send 225,000 people to do the Harvard MBA.

Buy the world’s 20 most valuable soccer clubs, worth €9.6bn, wipe their debt (€2.3bn) and move them to Ireland, building each a 75,000-seater stadium (€600m each, based off cost of Aviva stadium)

Host two Olympics games, based on the London 2012 cost of €11.2bn.

Give each one of the 10,000 most senior bankers a round of golf on old head Kinsale, the most expensive course in Europe, every day for 20 years, and hope that they come up with some ideas!Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Buy over one-third of Denmark, 10% of France or three Luxembourg, based on 2008 land costs.

Purchase carbon credits to allow us to burn 3000 sq miles of hardwood forest.

Send 833 people into space (or perhaps just 1666 one way trips…)

Build 1,000 km of high-speed rail, serving all major coastal cities on the island (based on recent costs in Spain)

Build 75 brand new 50-teacher schools and run them for 75 years.

Build 35 new Children’s Hospitals (based on €700m cost of new Children’s Hospital in Dublin)

Pay for cervical cancer vaccines for every girl going into 1st year for the next 8333 years.

Pay for an extra 5,000 hospital consultants for 62.5 years, based on Finnish wage.

Introduce free pre-schooling for 32 years, based on an average cost of €700 a month for two years of 10 months, for all 110,000 children in the country.

Give medical cards to everyone, for 25 years based on €500m cost in 2009 to cover 1.5m people.

Make education properly free – the current cost from primary school to degree graduation is €70,000 per child. €25bn would bring nearly 400,000 students through their entire education.

Or Ireland could buy one broken bank…oh, hang on…..

I could go on and on.

If I were Scottish there is no answer but YES.YES. YES.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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