guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks

And an alarming quote:

Jeremy Leggett, convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: “We are asleep at the wheel here: choosing to ignore a threat to the global economy that is quite as bad as the credit crunch, quite possibly worse.”

Frank Keane – Las Vegas

I take your wise point about being careful not to heap all blame on whichever adminstration happens to be in power: a knee-jerk response I have been often guilty of in the past!

In democracies the voters ultimately get the leaders they deserve.

I suppose my original post was borne out of my own conflicted feelings about governments and their agencies: I am, broadly speaking, a supporter of free-markets and firmly believe in the power of trade to help all parties involved. And I also believe public entities are generally inefficient and tend towards bloat and halpessness.

Yet, as I said, there are some catastrophes that only the public sector and their masters can deal with.

The question is if we should have resources held in reserve for such eventualities…and, if so, how much. The Norwegians seem to show the way here: when they had their windfall they built up a large reserve and didn’t allow their lifestyle-spending to run riot as happened in Ireland from the mid-1990s (and the US, arguably, from the mid-1950s).

My understanding of US Republican ideology is limited but I believe the aim is for government to be as slim as possible, leaving as much power as possible in the hands of the markets and citizens. If you’ll forgive the mixed language, a sort of über-laissez-faire.

The fact that the Bush administration demonstrated such serious failure is the result of some combination of ideological failure and incompetence, on which the electorate subsequently had their say.

Ireland, in contrast to the US, has a massive – and expensive – public service, and still managed spectacular economic failure, the extent of which is, I suspect, still not fully understood by the citizenry.

Ultimately, therefore, perhaps the responsibility for failure should not be carried solely by the government of the day, regardless of the public service (over which the government has control).

Just over 20 years the Cork University professor, Joe Lee, published a history of modern of Ireland that focused on the dominance of possession (of power, property, land, a rent-generating activity, a secure, pensionable job, etc) over performance.

This is accompanied by, and reflected in, localised political clientelism, corruption of a soft and insidious variety, cronyism among the political, business and professional elites and corporatism advancing the interests of the management and staff of state-owned interests at the expense of the public.

By examining the economic and social progress achieved by other small European countries, Joe Lee was able to conclude that this obsession with possession accounted for much of Ireland’s relatively poor performance since independence in 1922.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14025314&fsrc=rss&mode=comment&intent=readBottom

But why save them all?

In the free market that is (supposedly) the EU, by all means let’s have some foreign banks on our High Streets. There should be at least one though that is home-grown: an economy of our size, even in a reduced state, ought to naturally produce a few sound/prudent financial institutions.

(We may have to scout overseas though for sound/prudent bank executives however. I’m inclined to headhunt in either Norway or Canada).

Our problem was that we had way too many banks looking to create, at all costs, way too much domestic business.

Shedding a few of these would surely be a welcome relief and not have a drastic effect on neither our system nor our international reputation.

It’s not a bad thing and is likely to happen anyway. from what I hear AIB needs further recapitalisation which will mean that the state (ie. us) will have to take a larger ownership stake in it. the more we own of a bank, the more we influence its management, this, in my view, is close to nationalisation anyway.

In summary, we’re going to have to spend an utter fortune to clean up the banks and get a functioning banking system (eg 60bn or something). even though AIB and BoI are huge parts of the iseq and probably held by lots of irish pension funds, perhaps we should let them crash if they cannot make it work themselves…. nationalist feelings aside, I wouldn’t be averse to having a foreign bank offer merchant and retail banking in Ireland. if we can’t do it ourselves, feck it, import a solution!

Try a weekly round-up of your Twitter thoughts, rounding them out so that you feel you’re making your point as fully as you can, and you might find you’re surprised at the results.