After years of crisis and half-measures Anglo finally draws its last breath
It would appear that the Government is going to replace the promissory notes by borrowing money using bonds maturing between 25 and 40 years, with an average maturity of 27 years.
It is important to note that this structure may reduce the annual cost but will not reduce the overall cost of borrowing to pay for the banks - in fact, it
will increase the ultimate final cost. Think of it like a mortgage: to reduce your monthly mortgage payment, you extend the term of the loan but ultimately you end up paying more over the life of the mortgage.
The change does, however, reduce what is known technically as the "net present value" of the debt. For a country trying to creep back into international borrowing markets, this is critical - certainly when it comes to convincing outside investors that the State can pay its day-to-day bills without external help when the EU-IMF bailout programme ends on December 31st.
Moving IBRC's loans into Nama makes sense. It was hard to justify the existence of two State "bad banks" doing the same kind of work, running down the same loans, particularly when IBRC's running expenses were €320 million in 2011 and Nama's were €130 million.
Property crash
It has been a painfully slow, four-year resolution to the Anglo Irish Bank saga. Undone by the property crash, the bank was brought down by its exposure to builders and developers on most of its €73 billion loan book.
The run on the bank's deposits in September 2008 was the catalyst for the last government's bank guarantee, which has had devastating consequences for the financial health of the nation.
Extraordinary revelations about tens of millions of euro in hidden director loans belonging to Seán FitzPatrick and financial chicanery involving the hair-raising €7.2 billion in back-to-back window-dressing deposits forced the Government to nationalise the lender in January 2009.
Protracted efforts
The last government's protracted efforts to value near-worthless property loans and put a figure on the final cost of Anglo in 2009 and 2010 shattered outside confidence in Ireland's ability to pay for the bill on its own at a time when the State's finances had collapsed.
This, coupled with growing uncertainty about the holes in the other banks, forced the Fianna Fail-Green coalition to go cap in hand to Europe and the International Monetary Fund in late 2010 and secure €67 billion in emergency loans to cover the banking and public finance bill.
Thrown by last night's head-spinning events, soon-to-be-redundant IBRC employees gathered in O'Brien's pub on Leeson Street near the head office in Dublin 4 to catch their breaths and make sense of breaking events.
After four years of crisis and half-measure after government half-measure, it would seem that the former Anglo Irish Bank has drawn its own very last breath.
