Ireland Went Down With Its Banks. Why Didn’t That Happen In The U.S.? : Planet Money : NPR
The U.S. isn’t on the chart, which is based on EU data. But Jacob Funk Kierkegaard, the Peterson Institute fellow who put the chart together, told me that the U.S. would be somewhere to the left of the U.K. Roughly speaking, the U.S. was on the hook for somewhere around 10 percent of GDP, Kierkegaard said.
“We’re not talking about getting even close to Ireland, or, for that matter, close to the U.K.,” he said.
What’s more, during the boom, home prices rose even more in Ireland than they did in the U.S. So prices also have further to fall, which means more trouble for Irish banks.
It’s as if one of the regions in the U.S. where the housing bubble was the craziest — South Florida, say — was a whole country. That’s not so implausible; the population of South Florida is actually a bit bigger than the population of Ireland.
