"..Brian Lenihan, Ireland's finance minister, told Irish radio early on Wednesday the banks had "no funding difficulties."
- The Financial Times, November 18 2010.

The rule of thumb during a banking crisis: trust no-one, least of all the politicians. Peripheral Europe's banks and its governments are now caught like Macbeth's "two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art". Ireland's banking system and its sovereign creditworthiness are now effectively one and the same fragile thing. A comparison with US banks and their Latin American debt adventuring in 1982 is instructive. As Nassim Taleb put it in 'The Black Swan':

"In the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to all their past earnings (cumulatively), about everything they ever made in the history of American banking - everything."

And here is a brief section from Tim Price's conclusion:

We get no particular pleasure from discussing politics when we could otherwise be profitably discussing "pure" investment. But the investment problems of today are precisely political ones, which is one reason why they've become so intractable. One could plausibly argue that democracy sows the seeds of its own destruction when it allows swathes of the electorate to vote for their own enrichment, leading politicians to indulge in a race to the bottom, in fiscal terms, that can ultimately only lead to ever-increasing monetary inflation and currency debauchery en route to sovereign bankruptcy.

David Fuller's view I commend the rest of this issue to readers.