Irelands Shameless Bankers

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday August 04, 2009 23:21 by Enough is Enough enough999 at care2 dot com

.

Shameless Banker

On the 24th of July Permanent TSB announced that they were increasing their mortgage rates for 50,000 customers. Despite no corresponding rate increase in from the ECB, this announcement was been quickly followed by statements from other mortgage lenders saying that mortgage rates were “inevitable”. It is becoming clear all other banks are waiting to see if Permanent TSB succeeds in their rate increase.

What these banks fail to remember is that the same people they are exploiting to feed their profits through increased mortgage rates were forced to rescue them last September. Brian Lenihan announced the Bank guarantee scheme in September 2008. This saw ordinary people in Ireland effectively become guarantors for the bank loans. We were told that if these banks didn’t receive our guarantee they would collapse. Since then we have seen billions of taxpayers money poured into these same banks through recapitalisation schemes whilst ordinary people face pay cuts and job losses. It is no coincidence that the public coffers are now short of the billions needed to run essential public services.

In an illustration of their contempt for ordinary people now TSB have increased these mortgage rates extracting money to keep their profits high. All the other banks are clearly watching Permanent TSB to see if they can get away with profiteering from ordinary people despite the fact we are already reeling from government cuts they are responsible for. We have heard so much about how we all need to “share the pain”. The real question is when will the Irish banks feel the pain?

A newly formed group “Enough is Enough” is organising a protest at permanent TSB headquarters to demonstrate that Irish banks need to realise they cannot make us feel the pain any longer. They helped create the recession through reckless lending; the time has come for them to stop making us feel the pain.
Enough is Enough!