The Irish debt crisis is largely driven by Mortgage debt taken on my people who could afford the mortgage when both partners had jobs and when interest rates were low.

But this is not a problem with low interest rates. This is a problem with the financial regulator not making sure that banks don't lend to people who can only afford the loan because of interest rates that a blind deaf-mute could have told you that the ECB would eventually raise. Really. The ECB, and the BuBa before it, have been following a Taylor rule targeting German inflation since around 1980.

More fundamentally, variable-rate mortgages are an abomination unto God that should never have been decriminalised in the first place.

Even more fundamentally, an on-the-bounce financial regulator would have noticed - and killed - mortgages with a principal in excess of 5 times annual before-tax household income. With extreme prejudice, and no matter what the interest rate looks like.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.