quoting Bill Bonner

Conversation with a Dublin cab driver:

“You Americans are lucky, sure you are. You can just walk away from a house. If I could do that, I’d be out tomorrow. But here, if you owe money on a mortgage the bank can come after you. You can never get away.

“I got married about 4 years ago. My wife and I both worked. We had good jobs. We were earning good money. And we believed all that BS about how property would just go up and up forever.

“So we bought an apartment for 360,000 euros. It was only supposed to be temporary, because we wanted to have a family and we figured we’d get a house after we started having children.

“Well, we’ve got 2 kids already and another on the way. And we’re still in the apartment. And we can’t move. Because the place is now only worth about 160,000 euros — would you believe it? It’s come down that much. And I can’t make the mortgage payments.

“My wife lost her job when the trouble began. And now, with all those children she can’t go back to work anyway. And driving a cab isn’t what it used to be. Every time someone loses his job in Dublin, he starts driving a cab. There are empty cabs all over the place. So, I don’t make nearly as much money as I used to. And with my wife not working, I can’t pay the mortgage.

“So I went to the bank. You know they are all broke. All the banks in Ireland. You’d think they’d like to see an honest homeowner trying to do the right thing.

“I told them I couldn’t keep up with the payments. I asked them if we could work something out, since the apartment is only worth less than half the mortgage amount. But they wouldn’t even talk to me. I guess they have someone breathing down their neck too.

“So I just send them half the money I’m supposed to. It’s all I can do. And I figure they won’t kick me out. Not in Ireland. Ireland has a long history with evictions. It used to be that English property owners would evict their poor Irish tenants. So, now eviction is a bad word in Ireland, almost as bad as slavery in America, I guess. The banks — which have all been bailed out by the taxpayers — don’t want to be seen on TV evicting their tenants now. So I guess I’ll just keep sending them half the mortgage payment. I’ll probably be there for a long time.

“But sooner or later they’ll have to do something. There are 70,000 people in Dublin who aren’t paying their mortgages. And there’s no way they can pay them. The banks are going to have recognize, sooner or later, that they made a mistake lending all that money to us.”

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning

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