RTE Merchants of Doom

Is it just me?
Watching RTE News @9.00, we had two individuals commenting on the outlook for the Irish economy:

1. A worker from a factory that was closing down in Athlone. His view was that the Irish economy was going to get much worse.
2. The Taoiseach, who warned against talking ourselves into a recession.

Some might argue that RTE was giving a balanced view - one for and one against. But it does seem to me that the only group revellening in the current mood of despair is the RTE economics team, who seem to be delighted to report on every negative story. George Lee et al seem to to be beaming every time they have bad news to report or negative opinions to televise. They are just short of saying "I told you so".
The glass half empty brigade ("we are heading back to the bad old days of the 1980's etc") can finally smile. After a decade or more of growth, the doom merchants seem to think their time has come.

If only people listened to them a couple of years back something might have been done to prevent the hard landing we are having now.
And if the doom merchants don't get their message out then the government might sit back and do the wrong thing like they have been doing for a while now. I agree - I hate all the doom and gloom - but someone has to say it, and we can't shoot the messenger. We got to look at the people who were charged with the running of our country, and that's not RTE.

To be fair many many people warned about the silly spending that was going on in this country for a long time, but they were simply ignored by those who thought that the good times would never end.

Every economy that has massive booms will always, sooner or later, have a big slump. Did Irish people really think it was going to last forever? Did they really think that paying 100% mortgages over 40 years was a good idea? Did they think they could spend endlessly on credit and not have to pay it back?

There are a lot of people who will really struggle over the coming years, and I genuinely feel sorry for them, but we should have saved more in the good times to prepare for the bad times.

But who I have little sympathy for are those business people who fleeced us durign the boom, charging us an arm and a leg for food, drink, clothes etc. But of course they will probably have a few millino in the bank to tide them over - it will be Joe Public that will suffer.

I also think that the financial people have a lot to answer for - money was given out too easily, and people will always take it if its on offer. The Gov and regulator should have tried to curtail a lot of the silly lending.

But as someone else said, the horse has bolted.

Yesterday morning I was listening to the intro for a piece on Radio 1- something along the lines of 'a country with serious economic crisis and a political crisis'. I thought here we go again with the economy and what are they referring to re the political bit when I suddenly realised it was an intro about Mugabe...

It's all well and good "not talking the economy down" as Brian Cowen says but "talk" isn't going to make the petrol cheaper when I go to the petrol pumps or bring the interest rates back down.

Due to personalised and potentially defamatory attacks on named individuals I am closing this thread.