Re Texas and the S&L bailout: A reader has sent me a copy of a 1990 article by Edward Hill in Challenge, estimating which states gained and lost from the bailout. Here’s a table:
And back then $58.9 billion was real money; it was about 15 percent of Texas’s GDP.
Now, Ireland’s woes are so bad even that much would fill only part of the hole. But it would sure come in handy.