This talk was given at Feasta’s Irish debt crisis conference, on Friday September 23 2011.
Dan O’Brien is economics editor of the Irish Times. Before joining the newspaper in June 2010, he was a senior economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information and forecasting arm of The Economist Newspaper Group. In a dozen years in that role he specialised in European affairs and in global trade and investment issues. During that time he commented frequently on those matters in the international media, for broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC and in print, for newspapers such as the International Herald Tribune and the Financial Times.
Dan has also worked as an economist for the European Commission and as a consultant for the United Nations and Forfas. He is the author of recently published book: Ireland, Europe and the World: Writings on a New Century.
The EU has, so far, suceeded in preventing a major European military conflict, but, as Mr. O’ Brien said, failed to provide a successful single currency. These consequences affect one another. The void created by abscence of conflict, which generates its own economic development, is deepening the recession, which is why the situation is ‘highly unpredictable’. Until individual states within Europe realise the current model of pan-European cohesion is a failure and let go of failure, we in Europe will continue to suffer.
What an absolutely dreadful piece of waffle from O’Brien. Nothing to offer of any substance whatsoever. Even tho’ O’Brien admits that a currency issuer (“..of paper money..” – how a qualified economist could use such a ridiculous expression when most ‘money’ is created on computer keyboards is beyond comprehension) is essentially not limited in creating money debt free, he has completely ignored Marshal Auerback’s perfectly good proposal to resolve the crisis.
So speaks yet another economist & economics journalist who had not the slightest clue the crisis was coming & is completely uninterested in exploring either the reasons for that or his own failed thinking.
O’Brien also has the gaul to suggest we’re ‘all’ not so badly off because we ‘all’ had some reasonable store of wealth prior to the crisis.
No, ‘all’ of us didn’t Mr O’Brien, not by a long way. That ‘wealth’ was highly unequally distributed in Ireland as elsewhere. In fact it would reasonable to consider that an economic system that produces such continuously increasing inequality is at the heart of the problem globally, both socially & in macro economics terms, & remains so after the last years of failed solutions & ‘can kicking’.