Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairman and all the guest contributors for a very interesting run through quantitative easing. Having listened to all the contributions, which were all very informative, one is left with the conclusion that what we are describing is the intractable contradiction that is now facing the European economy and arguably the entire global economy. While quantitative easing was a sort of belated reaction to austerity and its failure, its impact, which may incidentally be somewhat beneficial for Ireland although we are not even sure of this because it is indirect, creates another problem on the other side, namely, the potential for asset bubbles.

Having gone through an austerity experiment which, frankly, was a disaster and has put the European economy on the floor, we are going back to what we did before but it is not even working. We are trying to give money to exactly the same people who caused the crisis the last time around. What we should be thinking about is how we got into this intractable contradiction and mess in the first place. I will put the following narrative and ask the witnesses to comment on it. The fundamental problem is the amount wages take as a share of the economy has dropped consistently since the Thatcher-Reagan period and the amount taken from the economy through profits has increased by more or less the same amount. I have seen some figures which suggest it is approximately 10%. When workers who have lower wages do not have the money to buy houses or goods, they must take out loans from the people who do have the money, who charge them interest. We end up in this intractable contradiction. The way to deal with this is to rebalance what was done over the past 30 years since the Thatcher-Reagan period and give more back to workers through higher wages and a higher proportion of the wealth our economy produces and take a correspondingly similar amount back-----