{"id":7952,"date":"2011-02-24T07:13:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T12:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7952"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:36:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:36:40","slug":"the-core-of-the-irish-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/02\/24\/the-core-of-the-irish-financial-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"The core of the Irish financial crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/2011\/eon0223td.html?utm_medium=twitter&#038;utm_source=twitterfeed\" target=\"_blank\">Theodore Dalrymple<\/a> explains the underlying reason for Ireland&#8217;s financial woes:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers\u2019 cupidity, and the mass psychology of bubble markets is easiest to comprehend there.<\/p>\n<p>Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates &mdash; completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed &mdash; which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road &mdash; a millionaires\u2019 row &mdash; has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent. During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought &mdash; on borrowed money, of course &mdash; and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Theodore Dalrymple explains the underlying reason for Ireland&#8217;s financial woes: If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers\u2019 cupidity, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,62,84],"tags":[436,71,426,33,1289],"class_list":["post-7952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-europe","category-government","tag-banking","tag-debt","tag-housing","tag-ireland","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-24g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7952"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7955,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952\/revisions\/7955"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}