Our economies have been hit hard by the global financial crisis but in addition, for all of us, the crisis has served to expose strikingly similar pre-existing vulnerabilities in our economies – not shared by most others in Europe – which would sooner or later have led to trouble even if it had not been for the global meltdown, notably: •  the wide-ranging imbalances created by a credit-fuelled property boom;  •  the growing dependence of the financial sector on wholesale market-funding, increasingly in the form of foreign borrowing, and  •  the extent to which the credit and property booms significantly boosted transitory windfall tax revenues, which came to be relied on to finance strong growth in public spending.
While the economy of the Republic of Ireland was the more vulnerable, and has been hit much harder, I think that these parallels are no coincidence. Indeed, the involvement of banks from each side in funding the property boom of the other is an interesting dimension of the pre-crisis bubble.