In reply to sensibleken:
> Remember Ireland paid 42% of the cost of the Eurozone crisis. That is an extraordinary burden for a country of such a small population to carry ...
Not really true:
"What Taft did was notice that there were two types of bailouts for banks around Europe. One type (promissory notes and the like) increased public debt because it was just a straight handover of money to the banks with nothing in return. The other type of bailout was governments buying shares in the banks, which technically didn't increase public debt because you got bank shares in return.
"Guess which one we did a lot of, and everybody else didn't? Yes, promissory notes and straight handovers of cash to our banks. We did about €42bn of that. Round all of Europe a total of around €100bn of that was done, so, yay, Taft claims we spent "42% of the European bank bailout".
"Does that cover the total cost of European bank bailouts? No, it doesn't - it doesn't even cover the total cost of ours. We spent €64bn, but Taft's figure leaves out €22bn of ours, because that bit was spent buying shares in the banks, and doesn't show up in his figure.
"What was the total cost of bank bailouts across the EU? It seems to have been around €600bn total. And yes, that means we spent about 11% of the total, which is still impressive.
"Were we "bailing out the European banking system", though? No, we weren't. We were bailing out our banks."