PUBS AND MONEY.

PUBS AND MONEY. The Irish experience of working around the absence of banks received some attention during the Greek and Cyprus banking crises. Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution website posted on the Irish experience in March during the Cyprus crisis and linked to this article on the P2P website about the Irish experience. The article, which relies on the work of Antoin Murphy, an Irish economist, concludes that: “economic activity in Ireland was not substantially affected by the banking strike.” The main medium of exchange continued to be checks on the closed banks, even though the checks could not be cashed until the time that the strike was settled. These checks were traded at appropriate discounts. Pubs were important. The P2P article points out that: “It appears that the managers of these retail outlets and public houses had a high degree of information about their customers—one does not after all serve drink to someone for years without discovering something of his liquid resources.”