While the Programme’s aggregate story thus ends well, it is instructive to consider in some detail how it might have been better designed. I will focus on some of the financial aspects, which, after the fiscal component, were indeed the Programme’s centre-piece. The bank bond issue Much has been made of the issue of “burning bondholders”, and rightly so.
Just as the scope of the two-year blanket guarantee of September 2008 had been criticised, the idea that the newly-unguaranteed remaining bondholders in the failed banks Anglo and INBS might now receive Government largesse was rightly repugnant to many observers at home and abroad.