WORLD VIEW:WHO PAYS? How to pay? These two major questions are thrown up by this week's convulsions in the world financial system, their deepening impact on the real economy and the frantic efforts to solve them.
Ireland was no longer alone in finding an emergency solution to its liquidity problems, as successive European Union states responded in crazy piecemeal fashion to similar shocks, involving many contradictory attitudes and decisions. But the distribution of costs and benefits between public and private and richer and poorer beneficiaries was strikingly different.
And a glaring macroeconomic gap was revealed between the EU's highly developed single market, single currency and interest rate regimes compared to its lack of any common financial regulatory authority for cross-border banking, or fiscal and budgetary capacity to address liquidity and recapitalisation. It is therefore not an economic union.
Speaking at an Alliance Française conference in University College Cork this week on Europe as an international power, one of the EU's wisest elders, the former Belgian commissioner Etienne Davignon, said this is the most severe financial crisis since the Treaty of Rome was signed and probably its most fundamental overall. People will look back on these weeks in the same way as they recall 9/11.
There is a pressing need, he argued, for proper ways to enable the EU act and think together. In fact, since EMU was designed in the early 1990s, cross-border banking within the EU has doubled to some 24 per cent of activity; but it is regulated by a patchwork of national authorities, committees and bilateral agreements incapable of dealing with this convulsion. If the EU is not strengthened, the single market and currency could fall.
Without the euro Ireland would have ended up in national bankruptcy like Iceland following the Government's decision to underwrite the whole banking system. Large and small EU states have been equally protected by it as they sought national solutions to a common problem this week. The euro makes the EU into an indispensable player in the world setting which now demands collective responses and a reinvention of the Bretton Woods financial institutions agreed after the end of the second World War. Davignon quoted Paul-Henri Spaak: "There are no longer any big countries in Europe, but they are unaware of it."
In this perspective it is instructive to examine Ireland's handling of the financial crisis compared to other ones. Asked by the Guardian about Ireland's 100 per cent guarantee, Sweden's financial regulator Bo Lündgren, who as finance minister rescued his country's financial system from collapse in the early 1990s, said he "was astonished" by what they have done, because it distorts EU competition.
That is now being addressed. However, the Irish plan tackles the liquidity problem, not as yet the recapitalisation one becoming necessary as bank assets based on property fade away. The Irish plan does not penalise reckless lending. Lündgren believes it necessary to punish responsible executives by criminal law or force them to pay damages. Nor does the plan take public equity in Irish banks, as was done in Sweden.
Monday's Danish rescue deal (triggered by Ireland's action) - unlike our one, but from a similar centre-right government - requires the banks themselves to stump up the money for insuring deposits, with the state coming in only if that fund is exhausted. Also unlike ours, the Danish deal bans Danish banks from paying dividends to shareholders, buying back their shares or issuing stock options to their managements.
In further contrast to Ireland, the UK's more comprehensive plan addresses recapitalisation head on through an equity stake whose logic is towards a more complete nationalisation - transforming the banking model and ideology which made London a world financial centre employing one million people in financial services for the last two decades. Gordon Brown also voiced the need for a more co-ordinated EU approach and showed a growing openness to Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal for an EU common buffer fund to recapitalise European banks.
Daniel Gros, an economist with the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, has been ahead of his colleagues in foreseeing the need at EU level for recapitalisation and for proposing such a fund. He suggests it could be administered through the European Investment Bank, which already has a mandate for intervening.
This is learning by doing - and the sheer speed with which trust has evaporated is breathtaking. Credit, it should be remembered, is derived from the Latin credere, to believe. Those ready to take political risks about how the financial system should be reconstructed will be rewarded.
In Cork Davignon remarked that pessimism is the tool of the weak, optimism of the determined. But recall, too, that if an optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist fears he may be right. The how of this crisis is now about avoiding a systemic financial meltdown leading to a global depression.
As to who pays, Gros and other economists believe mandatory debt-to-credit swaps should be part of the solution. Reckless lending should not be paid for by the taxpayer, but by bank executives and their shareholders. Such a swap would involve a refinancing deal in which a debt holder gets an equity position in exchange for cancellation of the debt. This would be a suitable way to ensure the Irish banking system buys out the 40-50 property developers responsible for their huge toxic indebtedness without being bailed out by you and me.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie