Fearing financial Armageddon, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee for the entire banking system's liabilities, and that 400 percent of assets as GDP on the private sector's balance sheet very suddenly became the Irish public's problem. The combined result of the property-bubble collapse and the banking system implosion was "the largest compound decline in GNP of any industrialized country over the 2007–2010 period." Government debt increased by 320 percent to over 110 percent of GDP as the government spent some 70 billion euros to shore up the banking system. Meanwhile, unemployment rose to 14 percent by mid-2011, a figure that would have been higher had it not been for emigration.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 184