Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [46]
A week later the Irish Finance Ministry hired investment bankers from Merrill Lynch to advise them. Some might say that if you were asking Merrill Lynch for financial advice in 2008 you were already in trouble, but that is not entirely fair. The bank analyst who had been most prescient and interesting about the Irish banks worked for Merrill Lynch. His name was Philip Ingram. In his late twenties, and a bit quirky—at Cambridge University he’d prepared for a career in zoology—Ingram had done something original and useful. He’d shined a new light on the way Irish banks lent against commercial real estate.
The commercial real estate loan market is generally less transparent than the market for home loans. The deals between bankers and property developers are one-off, on terms unknown to all but a few insiders. The parties to any loan always claim it is prudent: a bank analyst has little choice but to take them at their word. But Ingram was skeptical of the Irish banks. He had read Morgan Kelly’s newspaper articles and even paid Kelly a visit in his University College office. To Ingram’s eyes there appeared to be a vast difference between what the Irish banks were saying and what they were doing. To get at it he ignored what they were saying and went looking for knowledgeable insiders in the commercial property market. He interviewed them, as a journalist might. On March 13, 2008, six months before the Irish real estate Ponzi scheme collapsed, Ingram published a report in which he simply quoted verbatim what market insiders had told him about various banks’ lending to commercial real estate developers. The Irish banks were making far riskier loans in Ireland than they were in Britain, but even in Britain, the report revealed, they were the nuttiest lenders around: in that category, Anglo Irish, Bank of Ireland, and AIB came, in that order, first, second, and third.
FOR A FEW hours the Merrill Lynch report was the hottest read in the London financial markets, until Merrill Lynch retracted it. Merrill was the lead underwriter of Anglo Irish’s bonds and the corporate broker to AIB: they’d earned huge sums of money off the growth of Irish banking. Moments after Phil Ingram hit the Send button on his report, the banks called their Merrill Lynch bankers and threatened to take their business elsewhere. The same executive from Anglo Irish Bank who had called to scream at Morgan Kelly called a Merrill research analyst to scream some more. (“I thought your work was fucking shit!”) Ingram’s superiors at Merrill Lynch hauled him into meetings with in-house lawyers who rewrote his report, purging it of its pointed language and its damning quotes from market insiders, including their many references to Irish banks. Ingram’s immediate boss in the research department, a fellow named Ed Allchin, was made to apologize to Merrill’s investment bankers individually for the trouble he’d caused them. And from that moment everything Ingram wrote about Irish banks was rewritten and bowdlerized by Merrill Lynch’s lawyers. At the end of 2008 Merrill fired him.
It would have been difficult for Merrill Lynch’s investment bankers not to know, on some level, that, in a reckless market, the Irish banks acted with a recklessness all their own. But in the six-page memo to Brian Lenihan—for which the Irish taxpayer forked over to Merrill Lynch 7 million euros—they kept whatever reservations they might have had to themselves. “All of the Irish banks are profitable and well-capitalized,” wrote the Merrill Lynch advisers, and then went