Glad you like it. And I am in your debt for the recommendations.

We have another review coming out in the UK Quaker publication, The Friend, this week I think. I'll post it when it comes out.

Things are sliding back to the edge they all; thought they had escaped from nearly two years ago.

I have hardly had a moment to look at the blog until now. Traffic?! It's a stampede. I don't know what to think. Except I think I should say thankyou to all those who linked to me.

Nakedcapitalism, Housepricecrash and Zerohedge are the big ones today.

Found you from a link by Richard Smith at Naked Capitalism. Someone linked you at HPC as well. Hope you get traffic.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-26/anglo-irish-bank-credit-ratings-are-cut-six-levels-by-s-p-to-junk-from-bbb.html

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1126/breaking6.html

Gonna need some set of shears for haircuts of any meaningful magnitude.

I'm not holding my breath! I'm sure we've been here before.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/anglo-bondholders-square-up-to-government-over-possible-haircuts-2361791.html

Jim.

This is like a plot from a bad Bond movie; an evil cabal of super rich bankers work out how to suck all the wealth out of a few small countries without even directly killing people. It is outrageous. You can almost see them in their control room full of blinking monitors, one of which shows Ireland sinking into the sea, "Good work Number 2! Now lets turn up the heat on Portugal."

Krugman is right http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html?_r=1&hp – it would take a brilliant satirist to really wake people up to it. But, as more of this comes out, there will be people on the streets. It will get very ugly. The bankers have to be taken down.

As Chomsky cogently put it in 2008. "It reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice." http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20080919.htm

AIB and BOI were making obscene profits through the 1990s and 2000s, none of which they offered to share with me. And now that they've blown it, we have to pay 24% to their creditors every time we buy a Mars bar for the next ten years!

We need a Teddy Roosevelt in Ireland to take on the bankers; draft new legislation and put banks back where they belong – taking people's deposits and providing mortgages for people that have prospects of repaying them.

There must be justice. If they are not held to account, they will continue in the same way.

http://www.financialmirror.com/News/16181/20397