The shoe is on the other foot. Back in the boom, you couldn’t get a deposit rate without a zero and a decimal point at the front. The ECB benchmark lending rate trundled up to 4%.
Now the zero fronts the benchmark and deposit rates are more than 2%. The shoe is not just on the other foot, it is firmly up the backside of the banks.
For once, the headline news from Bank of Ireland’s half-year results last week was not rising loan impairments, but a flattening of its net interest margin.
During the first three years of the crisis, the banks were forced by the Central Bank of Ireland and then the troika to clean up their banjaxed balance sheets: too many loans,