Ed Kane at the Irish Banking Inquiry 28.1.15 - who pays for the losses?

Deputy Pearse Doherty of Sinn Féin asking Prof. Kane about the political and economic struggle over who pays for the losses in a banking crisis.

From the official transcript:

Deputy Pearse Doherty:
[your] 2004 paper says that while policy-making during a crisis may be of the seat of the pants variety, the policy itself is informed by a political and economic struggle over who pays for the losses. How important in the view of Professor Kane is that dynamic, namely, the political and economic struggle of who pays for the crisis in terms of framing the terms of the resolution?

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.