Morgan Kelly must be the most pessimistic person in Ireland as per today's Irish Times.
However I agree that the NAMA project is stupid beyond comprehension.
The entire banking system should have been allowed to collapse 18 months ago and with it the builders and others who could not meet their obligations.
This would have avoided all the recapitalisations and ground zero would have been reached immediately. Property prices would have found their real value and foreign banks would have come in to take up the slack. If necessary the government could have set up a new state-owned bank. All of the previous directors and senior staff of the banks would have been left with nothing - that would have been fair. The bondholders would have suffered the losses that occur in any capitalist system as would the shareholders of which I am one. Builders(speculators) and others would have suffered the same fate. Depositors have been protected which is only right.
Instead we have the perverse situation where the rich and greedy are been protected by a government which cuts social welfare - NAMA neither is nor ever was the only game in town.