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Back in September rumours spread in Ireland that one of the country’s biggest banks was close to going bust. Total nonsense, the experts said. Everything was A-OK. But the rumours persisted. On one radio talk show a caller pointed out that savings in the Post Office Bank were state-guaranteed in their entirety. Within hours millions of euros moved house from the banks to the post office. Next day the minister carpeted the (state) radio talk show for airing the ill-informed opinions of Joe Six-Pack without adding the sufficient balance of soothing expert voices telling us not to worry, to leave our money in the banks, which were totally safe. Three days or so later the government announced that all bank deposits were to be guaranteed by the ever-generous tax payer. It then became permissible to say that – yes, in fact – one of the big five or six banks was in serious trouble and action had to be taken to shore up the country’s financial system. Bank of Ireland shares are now trading at around one euro. In January 2008 they cost about ten. Anglo-Irish Bank shares are also at around a euro now, down from the region of 10 euros at the start of the year.

This, essentially, is why I am so worried by all the experts in Poland saying everything is fine and there is no cause for alarm. That’s what they said in Ireland, right up until the last lying minute. I suspect that Poland too will suddenly announce that although the banks are sound they are going to bail them all out – just in case. In fact, it might be happening already. Last Wednesday was set to be a disastrous day’s trading on the Warsaw stock exchange until at the very end of the day an international stock broking house suddenly started spending millions on Polish shares, driving the index up sharply in the last minutes of the day (an enquiry is supposedly underway). Perhaps someone got wind of a government plan to support financial institutions in Poland?

Witold Gadomski has a lengthy article on the crisis in Saturday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. It’s a tremendously boring article about the central bank, the bank oversight commission and some elected jerk who picks up a pay cheque for punching the clock at the ministry for finance every day. A big problem is that the important offices (the national bank and the oversight commission) are staffed by people who have not yet quite won the trust of the bankers. One of them (name forgotten) is a good solid worker but – again – he has not yet won the trust of the bankers. If he had won the trust of the bankers there would be no problem: banks would happily lend money to each other, just as they used to do when there was a man on the job who had won the trust of the bankers. It’s worse in the national bank. The man in charge there (Skrzypek) simply does not have the trust of the bankers. He is opposed to Poland changing its currency to the euro, or in other words, he does not have the trust of the bankers. He’s independent of the government but could he perhaps be just a little - a tiny bit - too independent – I mean after all, this is a man who doesn’t even have the trust of the bankers.

Yes, it is monotonous, isn’t it? Constantly being told in a not very well disguised way that the people who monitor and regulate the banking industry should be bankers. Because we all trust bankers, don’t we?

Before you get too cocky, Mr President Elect, you might want to sit yourself down and listen to words of wisdom from “free” market ideologue Witold Gadomski. The man is free with his advice and it would pay you to listen and listen good. The fact is, Mr. Obama, you have carefully avoided saying where the money will come from to fund your election promises. Sure, you spoke about raising taxes “but only” for the top 5% of American earners. You have avoided the question almost as carefully as Gadomski has: he provides no figures to show that taxing the top 5% would not cover the costs. In fact there is no analysis at all. There are figures, alright but no context. For instance, the budget deficit is 400 billion dollars. Is that a lot? What percentage of the budget is that? Obama’s plan to extend health care would cost 65 billion dollars a year. Well, it’s more than I earn, but is it a lot of money for the USA?

Taxes will have to be raised, Gadomski says, to pay for all this. And not just taxes for the rich, he adds without any attempt to justify his claim.

Mr. President Elect, should you not have warned Americans that they would have to tighten their belts? There’s a crisis going on, you know. You should tell people, Gadomski repeats later in the article (and in the sub-head), that they have to tighten their belts. Because they are stupid, you see. This is the first they’ve heard of a recession. Lehman Brothers? Nope, means nothing. Credit Crunch? Credit what? AIG? Still going strong, right? Americans are unaware that the deflation of a massive housing bubble is causing economic problems. They don’t know anything about it at all and have no idea why their mortgages cost so much more than their houses are worth. Tell them, Mr. Obama, tell them.

It’s not all bad news, though. The financial markets have reacted well to your election, “expecting [you] will quickly choose a responsible [code for right wing] team to take care of economic policy and formulate a realistic [code for right wing] programme.” How Gadomski knows that this is what the markets expect is left unexplained.

If that’s all too much to be reading in a doubtless busy week, Mr. President Elect, you could just pay heed to the headline: “Obama must forget about his election promises as quickly as possible.” And they wonder why so many voters are too cynical about politicians to vote.

Witold Gadomski of Gazeta Wyborcza is beginning to sound desperate. Today’s front page story in his newspaper is that the crisis is at hand. Ukraine and Hungary are in serious trouble and for foreign investors there is really no difference between all those East – sorry – Central European statelets. They’ll pull their money out of the whole region en masse, even if, say, Poland is actually in good shape. Already the zloty lost 18 groszy to the euro. But Gadomski on page two is of good cheer. A recession is not pleasant but it’s no catastrophe, he tells us. On condition that the economy quickly hits rock bottom and then bounces back. What is it that economists of a sardonic bent say, again? Oh, yes: even dead cats bounce. But for me the real gem of his piece is the following statement: “Almost everywhere in the world banks have stopped trusting their customers…” Bad customers! Bad customers! You may have thought customers had stopped trusting banks but you didn’t win a prize for defending market economics, did you, thicko?

Okay, so the US is not Poland but still I find the Onion more reassuring than Gadomski.

Witold Gadomski is plainly relishing the opportunities the current financial troubles offer for a fight. Here he is in last weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza, telling us all to calm down, calm down. There is no cause for alarm. The system works.

He quotes Stiglitz: “The fall of Wall Street has shown the world that a certain way of economic functioning is unsustainable. What is happening is a sign that the calls to liberalise the financial markets were mistaken” (a back translation into English). Gadomski comments that Stiglitz cannot decide if he is an academic or anti-globalisation ideologue. I won’t pretend to know what’s going on – pretending to know is the job of Henry Paulson – but Stiglitz’s words strike me as being very cautious and handily borne out by the collapsing right and left of banks. Then again, Gadomski has in the past won an award for “defending the principles of market economics”- regardless of how dismally they fail. It’s funny how talking up the markets is practically a patriotic obligation while talking them down is a dastardly act of treachery.

The front page of today’s Gazeta Wyborcza - apart from the strange claim that a 46.7% voter share for the left wing candidate in France’s presidential elections is a “crushing” defeat - re-runs the pensions time bomb scare story. The story is expanded on in the economics section and commented on by Witold Gadomski on page two, so it’s obviously Quite Serious. To recap: people aren’t screwing each other enough and they’re living too long so in a few years there will be no one left to support all the old folk. Poland’s population is predicted to fall to 30 million by 2030.

Unusually, the newspaper does mention the small matter of economic growth (or “increasing wealth”). However, rapid economic growth will not last and anyway it means that in a few years time there will be a shortage of workers in certain sectors. Are you following this? I amn’t. Something called the Institute for Structural Research says that increasing the length of time people spend with their noses to the grindstone is essential: the alternative is to raise taxes to pay for pensions. Given the choice, I’d pay more tax myself, but what the article does not mention is that it takes ever fewer workers to generate the same amount of wealth.

A trade union you may have heard of (Solidarity) commissioned a report sometime back from a French company. The report was titled “Niskie płace barierą rozwoju Polski” (Low pay is a barrier to Poland’s development). It is not referred to in GW. No trade union or anyone that might be reasonably said to represent working people is quoted in the article. The report found that from 1995 to 2000 “wydajność pracy” (literally, “work output”) increased by 58.3%. From 2000 to 2005 it increased by 19.5% (Nie 17-18/2007). That’s a lot of extra revenue to splash around on - oh, I don’t know - say, pensions for people who live longer than economists would like them to.