Brian Lenihan and credit crunch

Towger - I'm not sure to honest but they couldnt be much worse - my fear would be a dramatic lurch to the left.

Surely if we are asking for the people who ran the banks over the last few years to go the then same rule should apply the polictical masters who we elected and were supposed to be running the show over the last ten years.

Its nothing personal - I think Briano is a nice guy but his boss sat on his hands while he was FinMin and now he's left trying to clean up the mess
 
Sunny - Yep I agree FG have been wobbly - but politicians will always play politics - My main point is that we need to send a clear message out that we have control over the critical institutions and services in our country
 
Towger said:
... A day later Gormley sounded like a fool when interviewed on the radio, when he could not even answer the most basic questions.
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God help us, that would be consistent with most of his performances, including more recent ones.
 
The greens should stick to green issues - Did you hear Mansearagh on Marion Financane yesterday - now there's a buffoon......
 
darag said:
He is a trained barrister so I would expect him to be able to communicate and argue well.

Unfortunately, his job - that of finance minister - requires different skills than those of an orator. He requires skills in the areas of finance, business, banking and economics. He should have a high level of numeracy and analytic abilities. He should be able anticipate the economic and financial effects of his decisions. In all these areas he, in my opinion, has demonstrated fatal weakness.

So no - the fact that he comes across as decisive while giving radio interviews, etc. does not make me think he is doing a good job as a finance minister. The fact that he has made some very poor (in my opinion) decisions which may well cost us 10s of billions of euro makes me think he is a very poor finance minister.
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His predecessor, our Taoiseach, is also a Lawyer. He allowed public inflation to spiral out of control. He opted for an extended victory lap around Offaly singing on the back of a tractor; as if his leadership was the winning of an all Ireland or Heineken cup. As Finance Minister Cowen always sounded as if he was reading from his Departments scripts; but it is clear that he was either ignorant of the imminent collapse of the asset bubble and government over reliance of taxes on this bubble, or he is simply stupid on all things economic. He certainly took his eye off the ball. Maybe there is a lesson in this.

I agree with earlier poster that Ireland inc. has a lot of the farmer and tradesmen mentality. Most of the 280k employed in the construction industry during the boom are not well educated, but were coining it in on the sites. There is now a structural shift in employment and their low value skill set will never be as well compensated, and they are going to have to adjust their expectations accordingly or upskill. Perhaps they can become astronauts through FAS sponsored programme, and the billions we wasted on this state agency can bear some fruit.
 
mathepac said:
I honestly believe that comments like these betray a lack of insight into how government works.

Lenihan is supposed to have his officials to do the number crunching - that's what civil servants are for, or at least that's what they are being very well paid to do. Why have a dog and bark yourself?

I never voted for any prospective TD based on his/her ability to add or subtract, to analyse a balance sheet or annual report; the bean counters. economists and data analysts are in the Department of Finance, at Briano's beck and call. "Analyse this", quoth Briano. "Yes, Minister", respondeth a chorus of lackeys, civilly, diving for their networked PDAs (or quills and ledgers if they are there a while).
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That's not how the executive branch generally works in this country. Ministers are not simply the public face for decisions made by technocratic monkeys who "count beans". Ultimately they make the executive decisions.

In the case of the banking crisis, BL would have heard disparate arguments from senior civil servants, banking executives, representatives of the regulator, the central bank, outside consultants and would have also heard the views of our neighbours in the EU. From all of these views, he made and makes decisions. I find it very odd that you would think that lack of numeracy, understanding of finance and banking, economics or analytic skills is no barrier to having to deal with all these facts, figures, opinions and analysis (often contradictory) and chose the course of action which is most likely to benefit the country.

The ability to add or subtract which you seem to disparage as useless is the least I would expect in someone who is expected to make the final decisions on the spending of billions of tax-payers money.

And it is not "with retrospect" that his decisions can be viewed as suspect. The original guarantee was widely criticized and this course of events - wrt to Anglo at least - was predictable at the time.
 
shotgun said:
The greens should stick to green issues - Did you hear Mansearagh on Marion Financane yesterday - now there's a buffoon......
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Did you hear him on morning Ireland this morning? He sounded like a hyaena every time the presenter tried to interject.If this is the best that Fianna Fail can put out on the national airwaves we really are in a sad state!
 
The Edge said:
This is amusing. Our membership of the Eurozone (completely dominated by the requirements of the German economy) is the primary reason for the property bubble and resulting systemic banking collapse, but you want us to doff the cap to Germany? Simply hilarious.
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Are you now blaming Germany for our problems? Now that's not hilarious, that is sad. What Ireland in all it's false confidence has forgotten, is that Europe doesn't actually need us, but hell, do we need Europe. Not only should we be doffing the cap to Germany, but we'll probably end up going down on bended knee, pleading for a bailout.
 
The problem is the Government's finances have been overwhelmed at the same time as a banking crisis. Did the Dept of Finance do any stress testing on the exchequer flows because there is no evidence over the last 10 months of any sense of a plan to deal with a downturn. It is pathetic and we will pay for it heavily.
 
darag said:
... Ministers are not simply the public face for decisions made by technocratic monkeys who "count beans". Ultimately they make the executive decisions...
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That's what I said - decisions are made collectively at the Cabinet table, not by any one individual.
darag said:
... I find it very odd that you would think that lack of numeracy, understanding of finance and banking, economics or analytic skills is no barrier to having to deal with all these facts, figures, opinions and analysis (often contradictory) and chose the course of action which is most likely to benefit the country...
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He wasn't elected on the basis of his analytical or mathematical skills - he was elected because he was a party member with a powerful constituency machine and generations of party contacts and was seen as a candidate that could further the needs / wants of the electorate.

Maybe you believe that the facts of his election and promotion to Finance Minister shomehow magically imbued him with these abilities. The reality is they didn't and therefore his reliance on his officials / consultants to do the number crunching and word-processing.

At some stage in the future we may compare candidates' CVs before elections and decide who should be Minister for Finance, but for now we are stuck with the current processes which exclude us from that decision.
darag said:
... In the case of the banking crisis, BL would have heard disparate arguments from senior civil servants ...
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I agree
darag said:
... representatives of the regulator ...
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civil servants, who clearly didn't know a lot and did even less
darag said:
... the central bank. ...
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civil servants, who didn't know much
darag said:
... would have also heard the views of our neighbours in the EU ...
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more civil servants
darag said:
... From all of these views, he made and makes decisions...
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No he would have made representations to Cabinet who ultimately took the decisions and based on the fact that most of the input they / he got was based on inaccuracies, their decisions were poor, and continue to be for the same reasons.
 
Mathepac, I honestly have'nt a clue what you are arguing for or against.

As far as I am concerned, the thread was opened by the simple question
How do people feel Brian Lenihan is performing as Finance Minister?
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My answer was similarly brief and simple and to the point; i.e. that I believed that he had done very poorly as a result of his apparent lack of skills and knowledge in the relevant areas. In particularly numeracy and understanding of banking, finance and economics.

The only thing I got from your first response was that the skills I mentioned are of no import for a finance minister. Fair enough I understand this is what you believe even though I disagree strongly with it. Everything else (such as how people get elected and your generally hostile attitude towards what you imagine to be the relationship between ministers and their civil servants) has no relevance to my response to the original question as quoted above so I don't know why it's directed at me.

I'm not sure what it is that has gotten you worked up. I especially don't know why you'd go to the bother of selectively skipping parts of a sentence I wrote just to be able to repeat the phrase "civil servants" over and over?
 
As one of the posts made the point - why would you make such monumental decisions based on heresay from the vested interests. Mind you - we were supposed to have a regulator.

As in any major corporate entity you have internal audit, risk assessment, we have external auditors, supposed checks and balances. How could we end up in a situation where national institutions and supposed bastions of prudence end up in this situation.

Its like WALL STREET the movie, where no one could lose. Everone making huge bonuses, based on what? It;s absolutely bizarre but everyone was winning and no one wanted to admit that the Emperor had no clothes! Outrageous! Who will pay for this in the future? The people coming close to retirement? The pension funds decimated?

Will there be a clawback on all these banker bonuses - wealth created on nothing?
 
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