So the banks are telling their shareholders that the National Assets Management Agency will be buying their toxic assets for a mere 20% discount. This is mighty odd seeing as many of these toxic assets have had their values reduced by much, much more than that.

If this is the case then the Irish public is about to get absolutely shafted.

NAMA is one of those things that seems good in theory, but will be a disaster in practice. For over a decade the banks have been acting recklessly, lending money to anyone and everyone. This is mismanagement on a massive scale and now we taxpayers are expected to pay for it all.

Banks are a businesses like any other. If I ran a business and gave favourable credit terms to customers who might struggle to repay, then I would expect the business to collapse. If I was particularly reckless in granting credit I could be investigated by the authorities and find myself being barred from running a company. Banks are supposedly more regulated than other businesses yet it seems that they can make multi-billion Euro mistakes and sit back to let the taxpayer bail them out.

What’s more scandalous is that not one bank executive is being made to account for their mismanagement. These people have pretty much destroyed some of our nations biggest and most essential businesses, yet they are not being held to account.

Bank executives who authorised reckless lending should be prosecuted, or at the very least be barred from ever holding a directors position in any company ever again.

Scrap NAMA and use the money earmarked for it to do something useful for the benefit of the nation.

Now you may wonder what happens if a bank does fail? Not a lot really, the good bits would be split off in to a new bank with the same staff, logos and buildings and the bad bits would be left behind for the shareholders to deal with. For the majority of bank customers it would be business as usual. It may have a negative impact on how the business world views us, but our economy will be healthier in the long term as we wont have spent $90 billion on buying up bad debts. It would also act as a warning to our financial sector to better manage how they do business in future as it would be the clearest sign possible that they will never get bailed out when the make a balls up.

It has been said that €90 billion of public funds will be used to set up NAMA and buy the toxic assets. That is a lot of money for such a small country. I would rather not have my tax money spent on setting up the NAMA white elephant.

I say let the banks fail!

So Marks & Spencer is following hot on the heels of Tesco and is to lower prices in Ireland by around 12%. They say it is because of the economic downturn and because customers are more acutely aware of the price differences between its UK and Irish stores.

Or to put it another way they realised they couldn’t keep taking the piss any longer.

The fact that the Irish consumer has been ripped off for so long goes to show just how ignorant our elected representatives are. Although I strongly believe in free market policies and would never dare suggest any government get involved in setting prices, I still feel that our government should have been doing a lot more than what it was to encourage UK retailers to lower prices.

They said the National Consumer Agency would look after our interests and help lower prices. Not a bit of it. The NCA is a toothless tiger that arrived on the scene far too late.

For too long politicians have been explaining away the higher prices we in Ireland pay by effectively shrugging their shoulders and saying “Well, that’s just the way it is”. Hardly the actions of a government that cares for the economic wellbeing of its citizens, is it?