@GWhizz
I feel your pain. I felt terrible guilt for my own part in helping people people in Ireland do things which (I had no idea at the time) were never going to pay off.
I read the headlines on the cover of the Irish times this afternoon (it was on sale at a motorway services in England) :
- Weak Euro helping exporters
- Permemant TSB floating shjares to make up for low capital reserves
I don't know whether there was any analysis inside the paper, linking the two and sounding the alarm bells - because that is exactly what lead to the last bubble and the 2008 crash
The ECB is printing base currency faster than Britain and the US are printing their currencies (everyone gets to pay more for goods because the quantity of euros has increased, the quantity of real goods hasn't) - but the exporters get to transfer some of everyone else in the country's wealth into their own pockets for a short period of time.
And the banks earn interest by lending out the newly printed money, inflating the next unsustainable bubble, as everyone borrows for things that they will never manage to pay off.
The ones who gain the most are the elites who get to print all that new money and spend it before the prices rise, and the banksters help them to do it.
The rest of us get blamed when the money printing stops, interest rates rise, and it all goes tits up - because we were too foolish and we let our wonderful, well meaning governments down by our stupidity... or something like that