Professor Edward Kane:

I think it is terribly important. I define a crisis as a battle over loss allocation. There are firms with losses and no one wants to hold them. People are contracted to take the losses, by writing insurance or lending money or bonds, but they do not want to pay and they have the political power, in many cases, to see that they are paid. My superficial understanding of Ireland is that many foreign creditors were paid off with Irish taxpayers' money and it is astonishing to me how good politics, the way a republic or a democracy is supposed to work, would ever lead to that solution.