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Robin Hood Reversal

Trail of Robin Hood

So today Ireland gives away another €2.5 billion to the creditors of our failed banks.

But I shouldn’t say “give away”, as if it wasn’t earned. This money is a reward! It’s what we give to investors for making decisions that destroyed our economy. They bet that a property market can keep rising until every building is worth an infinite amount of money. The banks they invested in, quite naturally, went bust. We own these banks now, and we’ll all be working extra-hard for the rest of our lives to pay for those decisions. Though on the bright side we will be able to afford less health care, so our lives will be shorter.

All just to make sure that no matter how mindlessly, droolingly, shit-flingingly stupid the decisions they make, the richest people stay that way.

Let’s face it, we’re slaves.

4 replies on “Robin Hood Reversal”

Eh. That “bunch of rich people” might just as well be some pension fund that had invested in/with this bank.

Although I find a lot to say for the fact that those managing the pension funds have something coming for them, the question still is: Who deserves to get shafted the most in this case: the general taxpayer, or the pensioners?

There are better ways to support the pensioners – or indeed savers – who invested in failed banks than propping up those banks. Directly, would be one. Giving the money to the institutions that gambled with that money is rewarding bad behaviour.

It’s also a massive transfer of pension funding responsibility from the rich countries whose banks did the speculative investing, to the taxpayers of poorer countries whose economies have crashed. (Speaking for Ireland, we had created a reserve fund for future pensions – saved, not invested in any speculative way – but we’ve had to give most of it now to the bondholders of banks as part of our ‘bailout’ agreement. It seems speculative pension provision actually trumps cautious.)

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