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IPFS News Link • European Union

Deposit Flight In Ireland Forces Irish Central Bank To Print Money

• ZeroHedge.com
 
It appears that Irish savers are sufficiently smart to realize that their money is no longer safe in a banking system whose existence is now only backstopped merely from referendum to referendum. As it is very unclear what will happen to the IMF/ECB rescue mechanism once the Irish election is held in March, with a material possibility that the whole plan will be unwound, leaving the country's financial system in the wind, a behind the scenes bank run is accelerating. Incidentally while this was the topic of the December letter by Guggenheim's Scott Minerd, which we discussed in a post titled "Scott Minerd's Detailed Pre-Mortem On What Europe's Bank Run Will Look Like, And Other Observations", his just released January missive deals with precisely the same topic (see chart below). So faced with the prospect of accelerating deposit redemptions, what does the Irish Central Bank go ahead and do? According to the Independent it has gone ahead and proceeded with that traditional recourse to all regimes in the bring: print money. "The Irish Independent learnt last night that the Central Bank of Ireland is financing €51bn of an emergency loan programme by printing its own money." In other words, whereas Ben Bernanke may be 100% confident that US inflation courtesy of POMO and inflation printing will be absorbed by the "massive" excess slack in the economy (oddly enough it wasn't in Tunisia, as food prices hit records despite surging unemployment), we wonder if he feels the same way about other countries in the world, which are already part of a monetary union, yet which have decided to boost the "other assets" line in their balance sheets.

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