In case you missed the drip feed over the past year, that’s the total estimated figure so far (including impending recapitalisations) given by you, the citizen, to the banks – AIB, Bank of Ireland, Anglo Irish, INBS and EBS. It could end up being more. Remember that the State is borrowing money, or taking money from the National Pension Reserve Fund, in order to pay for these recapitalisations.
€27 billion rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? I am working with a friend on a visualisation of this amount, which we hope to publish soon.
Over the past few weeks, I estimated that the cost of the banking crisis is €35 billion in the “worst” case, and €24 billion in the “most likely” case. My worst case figure is higher than yours because I made a provision of €10 billion to cover eventual losses at Nama. More at http://www.planware.org/briansblog/
I’ll update my figures once the dust settles on Super Tuesday’s announcements.
We don’t need a visualisation. One can be seen here: http://url.ie/5jzb
If you pilled 27 billion 1 euro coins the pile would be 62,910Km high and 202,500 tons in weight
That’s just a bit more than the entire EU/IMF bail-out for Greece.
Speaking with an accountant friend of mine who see’s first hand businesses going pop almost on a daily basis. That’s seven business last week paying wages, VAT, PAYE, tax who are now not doing that.
Could or should there be a legal/constitutional challenge to the government unilaterally writing cheques to bail out the banks; the rationale is ‘because we need a working banking system’. Well don’t we also need a working economy which has small business at its core? Applying the rationale again to those thousands of businesses and citizens of the State who also need a cheque to bring them back to ‘normal’ – a pseudo NAMA Version 2.0 – anybody want to hazard a guess how much that would be? I’ll say it’s not far from ANOTHER €27bn
This might help – as a comparison, the total cost for reconstructing Haiti after the earthquake will be around 11.5 billion, according the The Economist
And you could get about 4 Large Hadron Colliders, and they’re more useful.