Wearing Out of the Green
by David Atkins
The Times has a depressing human interest story out of Ireland:
As an emblem of the modern Irish condition, Frank Buckley is almost too apt. Dead broke, he lives in a house made of money.
Euros here, euros there. Euros in the fireplace. Euros on the floor, on the chairs, in the windows. Worthless euros, taken out of circulation and shredded by Ireland’s Central Bank, forming the interior walls of an apartment that Mr. Buckley does not own in a building left vacant by the country’s economic ruin.
Mr. Buckley, 50, calls the apartment — built from thousands of bricks of shredded, decommissioned cash (each brick contains, roughly, what used to be 50,000 euros) — the Billion Euro House. He reckons that about 1.4 billion euros actually went into it, but the joke, of course, is that it is worth simultaneously so much and so little.
“Everything is centered on the euro, but euros are only pieces of paper,” he said. “It’s what people do with the euros, the value we put on them, that changes their meaning.”
If there is any doubt about Mr. Buckley’s meaning, it dissipates as soon as you enter the apartment, on the ground floor of an empty building in a neighborhood ridden with them. A large gravestone announces that Irish sovereignty died in 2010, the year that the government accepted an international bailout so larded with onerous conditions that the Irish will be paying for it for years to come.
If there’s an example par excellence of the myopic greed and stupidity of the Very Serious Economic Class, Ireland is it. Its low taxes and financial deregulation (it was once called the “Wild West of European Finance”) earned it the praise of the Very Serious People, and won the Irish economy the moniker Celtic Tiger.
Then when that same house-of-cards economy predictably skidded to a halt, Ireland dutifully followed the lead of the Very Serious Economic Class, accepting strict austerity measures for their people in exchange for a bailout of their rotten zombie banks. Again, predictably, the Irish economy is still tanking.
Very Serious Economists should be asked time and time again: what happened to the Celtic Tiger? Why did it falter? And why isn’t it recovering after austerity measures? Wasn’t deregulation and austerity supposed to solve all of these economic problems?
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