Monday, May 10, 2010

European Central Bank and the Irish Economy

The ECB’s policy of low inflation by keeping interest rates low made easy credit readily available. Germany, as David McWilliams has repeatedly indicated, in these circumstances injected unprecedented amounts of credit into the Irish Republic inflating the economy into, what bourgeois ideologues call, external diseconomies of scale, leading to a property bubble.

It is too easy to simply place the blame on the shoulders of the banks and property developers. Such criticisms are a form of simple minded nationalism. The acute economic and financial problems currently besetting Ireland are a product of world capitalism and not of a handful of puny Irish banks and developers.

Paddy Hackett