I take it you are joking? ‘Deferred debt recovery’ is about the maddest idea I’ve heard since FG proposed compensation for the taxi drivers and the poor eejits who’d lost money on their eircom shares. It’s nanny- stateism gone totally doolally and it’s economically insane.

At that rate of going I’m off to buy a fur coat on my credit card. After that I’ll empty my meagre savings account, book a cheap flight to Las Vegas and have a whale of a time on the one armed bandits. When I run out of cash I’ll slink home and whinge and moan about how I can’t pay my mortgage any more or my credit card debts and sure the State will pick up the tab… after I’m dead! Of course, when I tell my relatives, neighbours and friends they’ll all do much the same, happy in the knowledge that future generations will pay for it all – because at that rate of going the country will have defaulted on its debts several times over by the time I kick the bucket and any assets I leave after me won’t be worth tuppence anyway.

If the “the general public are more informed about economic crises” sentence was in reference to the IMF – it is worth noting that the research on the report ended on May 20th, anything that has happened between now and then is not taken into account.

If it was in reference to me, huh, you may well be right!

I love when the comments section goes off-topic but remains informed like this…

So once the banks are sorted out (or stabilised at least) we will still have huge chunks of the consumer base who are saddled with debt that they can barely about to service on their reduced earnings, why or how would they be able to fuel a spending boom? It is their debts not the debts of the banks that will prevent a speedy recovering. It is only by finding some mechanism to shift that debt burden off their day to day living that we will start to get things moving again. And the best way to do that is what I would term a process of deferred debt recovery, PODDeR. It would involve a large portion of their debt principle being taken over by an NAMA equivalent body and it is later recovered from their assets upon their demise. It’s a long term plan and it will mean that many of the current generation of children will not have a large inheritance coming to them down the line but it would ease (though not eliminate) the debt servicing burden from their parents. And it ensure that people don’t go all smart on us and try to die with no assets the debts will be intergenerational, i.e. passed onto their children directly.

And I wouldn’t even call myself a real lefty, you know.

In a humorous way, you make an essential point, and one that’s too often overlooked in the copious analyses of our current predicament – the ingenuity of people to adapt and survive even in the most challenging circumstances.

For third and fourth level graduates out there employment prospects look very bleak at the moment. Worse, expectations they may have had of getting a good job on graduation have been squashed. The ‘traditional safety valve’ of emigration in search of opportunities to build a career abroad, to which so many had resort in the ‘eighties, just doesn’t exist to the same extent now. In the past, governments tended to expand public sector employment to mop up the excess, but that’s not possible now either.

One of the most worrying aspects of proposals advanced to provide opportunities for unemployed graduates is that they are piecemeal in nature and do not fit into any overall strategy for dealing with rising unemployment within the broader context of fixing the economy, the banks and the public finances, which are the things we have to do if our economy is to stand any chance of avoiding a total crash. You’re spot on too about expanding role of ‘internships’, which is a grandiose term for working for nothing for the sole benefit of unscrupulous employers, particularly in the high value service sectors. All that does is displace existing and potential jobs; the losers are the interns who get turfed out when the period of internship comes to an end, only to be replaced by a fresh batch.

The whole intervention system is far too ‘top down’ in its approach. Far better to construct initiatives around graduate ‘networks’ or high quality business training for graduates, start-up enterprise grants and so on, that would allow people to harness their own creativity and channel it into doing something that is their own choice rather than something that’s been cooked up as the solution by a centralised administration.