EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Iliya Lingorski*
According to Tsvetelina Dimitrova from the Executive Agency for Hail Control, radar stations in Europe provide information every 4-5 minutes. “But you can’t say how the cloud will develop at the beginning, and when it’s already certain what’s coming, there are 10 minutes left until the start. Can you imagine the panic if we had said 10 minutes earlier?”
Could this have been the logic of the behavior of the "competent" and "responsible" institutions for the banking "hailstorm"?! With the difference that for this disaster, the latter managed to protect us from our own panic for much more than 10 minutes... let's say - several years.
And for the NHIF, was it like that there too? Just don't panic.
Otherwise, we thank the "radars" in Europe for providing us with information and warning us every 4-5 minutes about atmospheric hail, and regularly, every year, about the danger of financial and other disasters.
DON'T PANIC. Don't worry. The state will help, meaning we taxpayers will pay - a few hundred million leva for the National Health Insurance Fund, a few billion for banks and bankers, and then maybe another few leva for the energy sector. We won't even notice it. The state will intervene. They will give us some "state" debt - after all, this will be the money of the banks and investors - we won't take "live" money out of our pockets, supposedly. Only then will we return it to the banks and investors with interest. Or it would be best to "fix" it when the time comes for it to mature - again with a little more new debt and leave it to the children to think about. After all, the "debt" is already too small now, and the interest rates are low, because investors appreciated our stability. Sing, heart! The state will stand with all its might and everything will go on normally, as it was. Bye... until next time... Just, DON'T PANIC.
Perhaps the specialists in the "competent" and "responsible" institutions are hinting to us that instead of the rule of law, we would be better off with a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some of them seem to have long since recovered and are working very well on it - in addition to "DON'T PANIC", it says: "Few are those who realize that the president and the government have no power, and of these few, only six people know in whose hands the ultimate political power lies."
On TV, important statesmen and women tell us that, as always, all the specialists in the "state" have done their job. None of our statesmen, specialists and officials, each of whom is supported by taxpayers (oh, if only!), is responsible for what happened - the laws had restricted them too much, and responsibility should not have been transferred to them. Now we just have to trust those whose salaries we pay and who got us into this mess, to get us out of the mess. Let the prosecutor's office find and catch some guilty people, and we, the taxpayers, by paying the cost, are invited to give support through national consent to our central bankers and our statesmen so that they can vote for new laws with which, when they take more power, they will fix us... So that it doesn't come to this again, you see...
Nice, huh?
*The author is a former Deputy Minister of Finance, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Bulgarian Development Bank (Encouragement Bank) 2004 – 2006, and Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund for Bulgaria 2004 – 2005.
