. . .
Fourth, the “elsewhere” may include not only France and the UK, but also the States. Back at the beginning of the year, the staff at Naked Capitalism caught a glimpse of the massive presence of shadow banking funding vehicles in Ireland, during our attempt to dig into into GS’s Abacus programme. Such public listing particulars as there are, are to be found on the Irish SE’s web site, along with scrillions of other shadow-banking-related entities. One imagines there’s a tax angle, as well as a disclosure and reg-arb angle. I have no idea how much has run off in the last couple of years, perhaps lots, which would rather deflate my point; and finding out what’s still there might be hard. But anyway, there do seem to be *tons* of liabilities for international banks via Ireland: to the tune of $500Billion, according to Eurointelligence, who explore what happens if this unconvincing bailout of the very possibly hopelessly insolvent Irish state goes ahead.
So if you are looking for systemic couplings, then, pending further research on exactly what Irish debt restructuring scenarios blow up the shadow banking system (again), it might be time to lightly pencil in Ireland-US and Ireland-France, via whatever’s left of CDO funding vehicles, and the zoo of VIEs, SIVs, etc, apparently still pullulating in Dublin.
Fifth, there’s even a Belgian connection.
If you couldn’t tell by now, Ireland really is more than a sideshow, and even proximately, it may not just be about the Eurozone or the European banking system.
. . .
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