I leave it to others to choose how exactly to add up the cumulative total of “austerity” measures since 2009, but it’s a large multiple of what might have been saved by any technically feasible bank creditor bail-in in 2010 or 2011.5 It is worth noting that the new European BRRD legislation which was negotiated in 2012 completely reverses the earlier presumption and explicitly calls for bail-in of unsecured wholesale funding of this type in banks with losses of the scale of Anglo and INBS, in order to reduce the subsequent burden put on taxpayers.
This indeed has been a remarkable and welcome turnaround in European policy attitudes, but it came too late for Ireland.6 In the end, of course, the sums injected by the Government into these two banks have been financed at very low interest cost following the liquidation of IBRC and the exchange of the Promissory Notes for long-term bonds.