‘We weren’t in the game. But we get to pay the bill’

Bankers and Wankers lost OUR money in the Celtic Tiger Casino and now they want more so that they can play away as if nothing happened.

Below is an extract from Gene Kerrigan’s piece in today’s Sunday Independent and put’s the corruption that we are going to be asked to pay for in the coming budget of April 7 into perspective.
It’s entitled: Government playing a dangerous game

Here’s the game. The bankers made fortunes borrowing billions abroad, to lend to builders. The builders made fortunes selling houses to people anxious not to be excluded forever from the property ladder. The banks made another fortune inflating loans to sell to the anxious house-buyers. The builders and estate agents inflated house prices and increased their fortunes.

The politicians encouraged all this, with reckless tax policies and deliberately lax regulation.

This on its own would be bad enough, but the game got wilder. An enormous service industry grew up around the property boom — architects, lawyers, insurers, lobbyists, PR and image maintenance. The pay of senior bankers and top executives throughout the business world rocketed in sympathy. Soon, in those circles, a salary of half a million was the sign of a loser. A wage for the job wasn’t enough, there had to be bonuses. And massive pensions.

This was all separate from the financial partying of bankers like dear old Seanie Fitz, busily getting creative with figures.

An enormous culture of entitlement grew up around this nonsense. To rise into the top layers of many businesses was not to get a job, with appropriate pay — it was to be handed a winning lottery ticket. You were set for life.

This culture of entitlement — in truth, a culture of looting — spread through the professions, through private and public sectors, into the top layers of the civil service. Politicians joined in. Executive and professional pay began to relate not to the earnings of those at the coal-front, but to the inflated salaries, bonuses

and pensions of the absurdly overpaid top layers. Money breeds money — and the elite speculated on property here and abroad, running up huge profits while it lasted.