Take Ireland and Spain together and you do not have a story of profligate states, feckless workers, and all the rest. Certainly, the Spanish regional governments have a few white elephant projects that have worsened the situation, airports that have no traffic, massive opera houses with no customers, and the like; but these are symptoms, not causes. Indeed, in the Basque country, where there was more political control of the cajas, investment in property was not allowed to the same extent and the result was investment in manufacturing. The underlying crisis is, once again, one of private, not public, finance.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 190