Cross-posted from the Irish Left Review, perhaps to be read in the light of this not entirely surprising news from P. O'Neill on Irish Election.

"If you owe us £1,000, it’s your problem; if you owe us £1 million, it’s our problem" was how Justice Moriarty described the AIB's attitude towards lending when he was chairing the tribunal investigating Charlie Haughey's adventures with AIB.

How right he was. While we read the good news about the American government's using vast amounts of Chinese money to rescue the global capitalist system from total collapse, we shouldn't think that takes us all out of the path of disaster.

The Irish are bound to go the same way in 2009 that Spain is going at the moment. Like us, the Spanish have been enjoying an enormous property boom for the last few years. And, as in Ireland, it has just come stuttering to a halt, prompting a massive rescue from the Spanish government as the sector struggles "with high debt, plunging prices and an overhang of unsold houses and flats."

This is where Ireland is headed, but we're probably going to experience something much worse.

...would have been far preferable to taking the risk that the financial system would unravel entirely.

The Bush administration, sticking to its ideologue's guns, gets it dangerously wrong again.

Update: Ah: they were just saving up. Don't underestimate how catastrophic AIG's collapse would have been: not only do they insure most of the US's loans but they also have own most of America's commercial aircraft and have their fingers in many many pies. I think the state had to essentially nationalise the company not just in order to shore up the whole American (and global) economy but to shore up the financialised market system itself. Though it is worth pointing out that, approve of it or not, this sort of action puts to bed any talk of an adjustment: state intervention happens, as any student of regulation will say, when markets fail.

I suppose there's going to be a lot of crowing about how Gordon Brown's failure to get energy companies to pony up £1bn worth of fuel vouchers for the least well-off. Certainly Brown has some serious problems with his, um, capacity to persuade (things are bad when I agree with classics-my-arse Clarke).

But on this occasion I'm not so sure that his failings are all that bad a thing. The government has an opportunity now to really think about a long-term energy policy. And I think that taxes can do some of the heavy lifting for consumers here. Instead of taxing on profit, we should tax energy companies based on how energy efficient or inefficient their customers are so that companies would have a huge incentive to focus on their customers' energy efficiency.