THE BANKING inquiries have rightly concentrated on local contributions to Ireland’s meltdown, rather than already well-advertised global factors, such as the US sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Even so, the reports remind me of a feature of the crash that has been completely ignored to date, but that should have forewarned us. I refer to the names – dodgy in all cases – of the big financial ratings agencies, whose mistakes were so instrumental in the whole mess.
Long-time readers of this column will be aware of its interest in “nominative determinism”: the theory that people’s names can influence the careers they choose and how they behave generally.
Positive examples range from the well-known Niall Hatch, development officer (naturally) with Birdwatch Ireland, to the famous authors of a paper on incontinence once published by the British Journal of Urology: Messrs “Splatt” and “Weedon”.
But if the theory works, it works the other way too. So that when the ratings agencies were giving their Triple A approvals to certain banks’ “structured finance” packages that later proved to be pure junk, surely their names alone should have waved red flags?
How did it happen, for example, that in a world where investor confidence is everything, the most venerable rating agency of all is one called “Moody’s”? Founded in 1909 by a John Moody, it somehow survived the Wall Street crash. And, despite massive criticism of its methods, it also seems to have survived the latest one.
Indeed, there it was again last year, slashing Ireland’s credit rating to reflect the degree to which this country’s credibility had been damaged by its misplaced faith in banks. The nerve! Moody’s was not alone in downgrading us, of course. So did the other dominant player, whose performance in the run-up to the crisis is summed up by its name: “Standard Poor’s”. And also joining the queue to kick us when we were down was the third of the big agencies, Fitch.
Somehow, the name “Fitch” does not fill one with confidence either. No doubt this is partly because of its unfortunate similarity with the verb “filch”. But it may also be because we vaguely remember (and have since checked in our dictionary) that “fitch” is a noun meaning “polecat’s hair”. Thus one of the ratings agencies has a name suggesting emotional instability. Another suggests general mediocrity. And the third evokes an animal which is most famous for smelling to high heaven. So why did we not see the global bank crisis coming? All right, I’m not seriously suggesting that wider study of nominative determinism might have saved us. The truth, I suspect, is that there are as many cases to disprove the theory as support it.
Take Warren Buffett, who last week defended Moody’s – which he would, of course, being its biggest shareholder – before the Washington inquiry into the US crisis. No surname inspires investor confidence quite like his, despite also being a verb meaning to “knock, hurt, plague” or (in aeronautics) “subject to irregular oscillations”.
Even so, I must again admire the Government’s wisdom, however belated, in giving responsibility for one of our bank inquiries to a man called Klaus Regling. His name derives from the German verb “to rule, or regulate”. And if only he had arrived here earlier, we might have escaped the worst.
SPEAKING OF standards, poor and otherwise, my thanks to the eagle-eyed Eanna Brophy for spotting a telling detail in this newspaper recently. It was in a bilingual notice from the Office of the Attorney General, inviting submissions for a scheme to, among other things, ensure “a higher standard of public services through Irish”: Naturally, the notice thereby invoked Murphy’s Law of Typos, or “Muphry’s Law”, as it’s better known. And sure enough, the Irish version read as follows: “Is é bun-chuspóir an Achta ná a chinntiú go mbeadh fáil níos mó ar sheirbhísí poiblí trí Ghaeilge agus go mbeadh said [sic] ar chaighdeán níos airde.” Clearly, moves to raise Irish standards have not come a moment too soon. But perhaps this error, involving only two transposed letters and thereby almost invisible, was deliberate. We know that the Attorney General’s Office is a place where every letter matters: indeed, its possession of letters – real or rumoured – has been known to rock the State to its foundations (copyright Pat Rabbitte 1994, all rights reserved), or at least bring down governments.
So maybe this was a cunning plan, whereby the first person to spot the deliberate mistake would thereby recommend him or herself as the person most suited to overseeing the scheme. In which case, I congratulate the AG’s office on its success. And I wish Eanna Brophy well in the important work ahead.
SPEAKING OF transpositions, I see that an Icelandic tenor due to perform in the National Concert Hall tonight has been described as having “the voice of Pavarotti and the looks of Brad Pitt”. You can see the problem that would arise, in these days of cut-and-paste editing, if a newspaper got these attributes the wrong way around; although Brad Pitt may well be a fine singer, for all I know, and Pavarotti was probably handsome in his own way, if only to his mother.
In any case, Gardar Thór Cortes – which is the hunky tenor’s name – will be performing with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Galway Baroque singers, and others. The programme includes Puccini’s Messa di Gloria, and more details are at www.nch.ie
fmcnally@irishtimes.com