Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

by Michael Lewis

  It’s twilight as we roll across the tiny bridge and onto the island. On either side of the snaking single-lane road, peat bogs stretch as far as the eye can see. The feel is less “tourist destination” than “end of the earth.” (“The next stop is Newfoundland,” says Ian.) The Achill Head Hotel—Joe’s first venture, still run by his ex-wife—was closed and dark. But there, smack in the middle of the tiny village of his hometown of Keel, was the source of all of Joe McNamara’s financial troubles: a giant black hole, surrounded by bulldozers and materials. He’d set out in 2005 to build a modest one-story hotel with twelve rooms. In April 2006, with the Irish property market exploding, he’d expanded his ambition and applied for permission to build a multistory luxury hotel. At exactly that moment, the market turned. “We went away in June of 2006,” Ronan O’ Driscoll, the Savills broker, told me. “We came back in September and everything had just stopped. How does everyone decide at once that it is time to stop—that it’s become mad?”

  For the past four years the hotel site had scarred the village. But it wasn’t until May 2010 that Anglo Irish Bank, which had lent McNamara the money to develop it, threatened to force him into receivership. Irish bankruptcy laws were not designed for spectacular failure, perhaps because the people who wrote them never imagined spectacular success. When a bank forces an Irish person into receivership, it follows up with a letter to his blood relations, informing them of his insolvency—and his shame. A notice of the bankruptcy is published in one national and one local newspaper. For as many as twelve years the Irish bankrupt is not permitted to take out a loan for more than 650 euros, or to own assets amounting to more than 3,100 euros, or to travel abroad without government permission. For twelve years part of what he earns may pass directly to his creditors. “It’s not like the United States, where being bankrupt is almost a badge of honor,” says Patrick White, of the Irish Property Council. “Here you are effectively disbarred from commercial life.”

  There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that newly applies to Ireland. The debts of Ireland’s big property developers—defined as anyone who owed the bank more than 20 million euros—are now being worked out behind closed doors. In exchange for helping the government to manage or liquidate their real estate portfolios, the biggest failures have been spared bankruptcy. Smaller developers, like McNamara, are in a far harder place; and while no one seems to know how many of these people exist, the number is clearly big. Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency controls roughly 80 billion euros’ worth of commercial property loans. An Irish property expert named Peter Bacon, who advised NAMA when it was created, recently revealed that when he’d added up the smaller Irish property-related loans (those under 20 million euros), they amounted to another 80 billion euros. Some very large number of former Irish tradesmen are in exactly Joe McNamara’s situation. Some very large number of Irish homeowners are in something very like it.

  The difference between McNamara and everyone else is that he’d complained about it, publicly. But then, apparently, had genuinely thought better of it. I’d tracked down and phoned his ex-wife, who just laughed and told me to get lost. I finally reached McNamara himself, ambushing him on his cell phone. But he only muttered something about not wanting to draw further attention to himself, then hung up. It was only after I texted him to say I was en route to his hometown that he became sufficiently aroused to communicate. “What are you doing in Keel????” he hollered by text message, more than once. “Tell me Why are you going to Keel???” Then, once again, he fell silent. “The problem with the Irish people,” Ian says, as we drive away from the black hole that bankrupted Joe McNamara, “is that you can push them and push them and push them. But when they break they go wacko.” (A month later, after a period of silence, McNamara would reappear, screaming from the top of a building crane that he had driven across the country and ditched, once again, in front of the Parliament.)

  TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones, too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.

  So far as I could see, by November 10, 2010, the population of Irish people willing to make a stink about what has happened to them had been reduced to one: the egg-thrower. The next day we pull up outside his home, a modest old row house on the outskirts of Dublin. The cheery elderly gentleman who opens the door in a neat burgundy sweater and well-pressed slacks has, among his other qualities, fantastically good manners. He has the ability to seem pleased even when total strangers ring his doorbell, and to make them feel welcome. On the table in Gary Keogh’s small and tidy dining room is a book, created by his grandchildren, dated May 2009. Granddad’s Eggcellent Adventure, it is called.

  In the months after Brian Lenihan’s bank bailout, Keogh, for the first time in his life, began to pay attention to the behavior of the Irish bankers. His own shares in AIB, once thought to be as sound as cash or gold, were rapidly becoming worthless, but the bank’s executives exhibited not the first hint of remorse or shame. AIB’s chairman, Dermot Gleeson, and its CEO, Eugene Sheehy, troubled him the most. “The two of ’em stood up, time and again, and said, ‘Our bank is one hundred percent sound,’” explains Keogh. “As if nothing at all was the matter!” He set out to learn more about these people in whom he had always placed blind trust. What he found—high pay, corporate boondoggles—outraged him further. “The chairman paid himself four hundred seventy-five thousand to chair twelve meetings!” he still shouts.

  What Keogh learned remains both the most shocking and the most familiar aspect of the Irish catastrophe: how easily ancient financial institutions abandoned their traditions and principles. An upstart bank, Anglo Irish, had entered their market, and professed to have found a new and better way to be a banker. Anglo made incredibly quick decisions: an Irish property developer could walk into Anglo’s office in the late afternoon with a new idea and walk out with hundreds of millions of euros the same night. Anglo was able to shovel money out its door so quickly because it had turned banking into a family affair: if they liked the man they didn’t bother to evaluate his project.

  Rather than point out the insanity of the approach, the two old Irish banks simply caved to it. An Irish businessman named Denis O’Brien sat on the board of the Bank of Ireland in 2005, when it was faced with the astonishing growth of Anglo Irish. (Anglo Irish was about to double in size in just two years.) “I remember the CEO coming in and saying, ‘We’re going to grow at 30 percent a year,’” O Brien told me. “I said how the fuck are you going to do that? Banking is a five-to-seven-percent-a-year growth business at best.”

  They did it by doing what Anglo Irish had done: writing checks to Irish property developers to buy Irish land at any price. AIB, which had paid its lending officers based on how many dollars they lent, opened a unit nicknamed ABA (Anybody but Anglo), dedicated to poaching Anglo’s biggest property developer clients—the very people who would become the most spectacular busts in Irish history. In October 2008 the Irish Times published a list of the five biggest real estate deals from the past three years. Allied Irish lent the money for ten of the fifteen, Anglo Irish for just one. On Irish national radio the insolvent property developer Simon Kelly, who personally owes 200 million euros to various Irish banks and who belongs to a partnership that owes another 2 billion euros, confessed that the only time in his career a banker became upset with him was when he repaid a loan, to Anglo Irish—with money borrowed from Allied Iris
h. The former Anglo Irish executives I interviewed (off the record, as they are all in hiding) speak of their older, more respectable imitators with a kind of amazement. “Yes, we were out of control,” they say, in so many words. “But those guys were fucking nuts.”

  Gary Keogh thought about how Ireland had changed from his youth, when the country was dirt poor. “I used to collect bottle caps,” he says. “Now the health service doesn’t even bother to take back crutches anymore? No! We’re far too wealthy.” Unlike most people he knew, Keogh had no debts. “I had nothing to lose,” he says. “I didn’t owe anyone any money. That’s why I could do it!” He’d also just recovered from a serious illness, and felt a bit as if he was playing with house money. “I had just got a new kidney and I was very pleased with it,” he says. “But I think it must have been Che Guevera’s kidney.” He describes his elaborate plot the way an assassin might describe the perfect hit. “I only had two rotten eggs,” he says, “but by God they were rotten! Because I kept them six weeks in the garage!”

  The AIB shareholders meeting of March 2009 was the first he’d ever attended. He was, he admits, a bit worried something might go wrong. Worried parking might be a problem, he took the bus; worried that his eggs might break, he designed a container to protect them; worried that he didn’t even know what the room looked like, he left himself time to case the meeting hall. “I got to the front door early and had a little recce,” as he puts it, “just to see what was going to happen.” His egg container was too large to sneak inside, so he ditched it. “I had one egg in each jacket pocket,” he says. Worried that his eggs might be too slippery to grip and throw, he’d wrapped each of them in a thin layer of cellophane. “I positioned myself four rows back and four seats in,” he says. “Not too close but not too far.” Then he waited for his moment.

  It came immediately. Right after the executives took their places at the dais, a shareholder stood up, uninvited, to ask a question. Gleeson, AIB’s chairman, barked, “Sit down!”

  “He thought he was a dictator!” says Keogh, who had heard enough. He rose to his feet and shouted, “I’ve listened to enough of your crap! You’re a fucking bastard!” And then he began firing.

  “He thought he had been shot,” he says now with a little smile, “because the first egg hit the microphone and went Pow!” It splattered onto the shoulder pad of Gleeson’s suit. The second egg missed the CEO but nailed the AIB sign behind him.

  Then the security guards were on him. “I was told I would be arrested and charged, but I never was,” he says. Of course he wasn’t: this was, at bottom, a family dispute. The guards wanted to escort him out, but he actually left the place on his own and climbed aboard the next bus home. “The incident happened at ten past ten in the morning,” he says. “I was home by ten to eleven. At ten past eleven the phone rang. And I was on the radio for an hour.” Then, but briefly, all was madness. “The press descended on the house and they wouldn’t get out,” he says. It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t sticking around. He’d done exactly what he’d planned to do and saw no need to make a further fuss. He flew out of Dublin Airport at six the next morning for a long-planned Mediterranean cruise.

  * On July 10, 2011, after a phone-hacking scandal, News of the World was closed.

  † Lenihan died in June 2011, seven months after this interview.

  IV

  THE SECRET LIVES OF GERMANS

  By the time I arrived in Hamburg, in the summer of 2011, the fate of the financial universe seemed to turn on which way the German people jumped. Moody’s was set to downgrade the Portuguese government’s debt to junk bond status, and Standard & Poor’s had hinted darkly that Italy might be next. Ireland was about to be downgraded to junk status, too, and there was a very real possibility that the newly elected local Spanish governments might seize the moment to announce that the former local Spanish governments had miscalculated, and owed foreigners a lot more money than they previously imagined. Then there was Greece. Of the 126 countries with rated debt, Greece now ranked 126th: the Greeks were officially regarded as the least likely people on the planet to repay their debts. As the Germans were not only the biggest creditor of the various deadbeat European nations but their only serious hope for future funding, it was left to the Germans to act as moral arbiter, to decide which financial behaviors would be tolerated and which would not. As a senior official at the Bundesbank put it to me, “If we say no, it’s no. Nothing happens without Germany. This is where the losses come to live.” Just a year ago, when German public figures called Greeks cheaters, or German magazines ran headlines like WHY DON'T YOU SELL YOUR ISLANDS, YOU BANKRUPT GREEKS?, ordinary Greeks took it as an outrageous insult. In June of 2011 the Greek government started selling islands, or at any rate created a fire-sale list of thousands of properties—golf courses, beaches, airports, farmlands, roads—that they hoped to auction in order to help repay their debts. It’s safe to say that the idea of doing this had not come from the Greeks.

  To no one but a German is Hamburg an obvious place to spend a vacation, but it happened to be a German holiday, and Hamburg was overrun by German tourists. When I asked the hotel concierge what there was to see in his city, he had to think for a few seconds before he said, “Most people just go to the Reeperbahn.” The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s red-light district, the largest red-light district in the world, according to one guidebook, though you have to wonder how anyone figured that out. And the Reeperbahn, as it happens, was why I was there.

  Perhaps because they have such a gift for creating difficulties with non-Germans, the Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Written in the early 1980s by a distinguished American anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerning Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass). . . . Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

  He proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (The Money Shitter), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. The world’s first museum devoted exclusively to toilets is in Munich. (A second has opened in New Delhi.) The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment once was “my little shitbag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

  Dundes caused a bit of a stir, for an anthropologist, by tracking this single low national character trait into the most important moments in German history. The fiercely scatological Martin Luther (“I am like ripe shit and the world is a gigantic ass-hole,” Luther once explained) had the idea that launched the Protestant Reformation while sitting on the john. Mozart’s letters revealed a mind, as Dundes put it, whose “indulgence in fecal imagery may be virtually unmatched.” Hitler’s favorite word was Scheisskerl (shithead): he apparently used it to describe not only other people but himself as well. After the war Hitler’s doctors told U.S. intelligence officers that their patient had devoted surprising energy to examining his own feces; and there was pretty strong evidence that one of his favorite things to do with women was to have them poop on him. Perhaps Hitler was so persuasive to Germans, Dundes suggested, because he shared their quintessential trait, a public abhorrence of filth that masked a private obsession. “The combination of c
lean and dirty: clean exterior–dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content—is very much a part of the German national character,” he wrote.

  Dundes confined himself mainly to the study of low German culture. (For those hoping to examine coprophilia in German high culture he recommended another book, by a pair of German scholars, called The Call of Human Nature: The Role of Scatology in Modern German Literature.) Still, it was hard to come away from his treatise without the strong sense that all Germans, high and low, were a bit different from you and me—a point he made in the introduction to the paperback version of his book. “The American wife of a German-born colleague confessed to me that she understood her husband much better after reading the book,” he wrote. “Prior to that time, she had wrongly assumed that he must have some kind of peculiar psychological hang-up inasmuch as he insisted upon discussing at great length the state of his latest bowel movement.”

  The Hamburg red-light district had caught Dundes’s eye because the locals made such a big deal of mud wrestling. Naked women fought in a ring of filth while the spectators wore plastic caps, a sort of head condom, to avoid being splattered. “Thus,” wrote Dundes, “the audience can remain clean while enjoying dirt!” Germans longed to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

  A WEEK EARLIER, in Berlin, I had gone to see Germany’s deputy minister of finance, a forty-four-year-old career government official named Jörg Asmussen. The Germans now are in possession of the only Finance Ministry in the big-time developed world whose leaders don’t need to worry whether their economy will collapse the moment investors stop buying their bonds. As unemployment in Greece climbs to the highest on record (16.2 percent, at last count), it falls in Germany to twenty-year lows (6.9 percent). Germany appears to have experienced a financial crisis without economic consequences. They’d donned head condoms in the presence of their bankers, and avoided being splattered by their mud. As a result, for the past year or so the financial markets have been trying and failing to get a read on the German people: they can obviously afford to pay off the debts of their fellow Europeans, but will they actually do it? Are they now Europeans, or are they still Germans? Any utterance or gesture by any German official anywhere near this decision for the past eighteen months has been a market-moving headline, and there have been plenty of them, most of them echoing German public opinion, and expressing incomprehension and outrage that other people can behave so irresponsibly. Asmussen is one of the Germans now being obsessively watched. Along with his boss, Wolfgang Schäuble, he’s one of two German officials present in every conversation between the German government and the deadbeats.