Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on the Irish collapse is less entertaining than his trips to Greece and Iceland. Perhaps that’s because it’s closer to home. It’s still good, however, and worth your time even if much of it will be familiar. On the other hand, this passage is worth a raised eyebrow or two:
A week later the department [of Finance] hired investment bankers from Merrill Lynch to advise it. Some might say that if you were asking Merrill Lynch for financial advice in 2008 you were already beyond hope, but that is not entirely fair. The bank analyst who had been most prescient and interesting about the Irish banks worked for Merrill Lynch. His name was Philip Ingram. In his late 20s, and a bit quirky—at the University of Cambridge he had studied zoology—Ingram had done something original and useful: he’d shined a new light on the way Irish banks lent against commercial real estate.
The commercial-real-estate loan market is generally less transparent than the market for home loans.
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