Margaret Doyle | INTERVIEW
Doyle says. “I like having deadlines.” Bedtime is between 10pm and 11. Doyle grew up in Wexford, one of nine children. She went to school in Loreto Convent in Wexford, where she was head girl, before attending Trinity College as an entrance exhibitioner and then a foundation scholar. The scholarships continued to pile up – she went to Harvard with a Fulbright, and later became a Baker scholar by graduating in the top 5% of her class. However, she is modest about her achievements. “Harvard Business School (HBS) is different from the rest of Harvard, it is a trade school and it does not pretend to be anything else,” she says. “Academically I found Trinity just as much, if not more demanding than HBS.” From her vantage point in London, Doyle has keenly observed Ireland’s financial meltdown. As long ago as 2003, she predicted a property crisis on the back of a report drawn up by a then-colleague at The Economist, Pamela Woodall, which showed that Ireland had a bubble. “Back then, of course, people thought, ‘You are mad.’ Especially when prices continued to rise, they thought, ‘How foolish!’” Now, though, the pendulum of emotions has swung too far the other way, and Doyle thinks there are grounds for cautious optimism – although in her opinion house prices will drop further. “I think that the gloom is overstated, as is often the way,” she suggests. “That is not to say that things are not really tough; but there are some bright spots.” She names the low corporate tax rate, a strong export sector, and being part of the Eurozone as factors which will help to improve Ireland’s plight. Doyle also hopes that there will be reform, both financial and political. Doyle notes that Ireland’s economy did thrive for a while. The trouble is that it is hard to distinguish a bubble from a boom. “It is very tough to be the one person, the boy who says ‘the emperor has no clothes.’ It is very hard to judge market timing. So, for example, in Ireland there was a real boom which morphed into a bubble. But it is very difficult to identify the moment of transition.” Nor was Ireland’s misfortune unique, she says, just unusual in its scale and impact. “And of course,” she adds, “there is the nature of the bank guarantee, which is a whole other story.” Her career in London’s financial centre has given her a broad perspective on the global chaos which unspooled in 2008. The scariest thing, according to Doyle, is that everybody got it wrong. “It would be very easy if we could say, ‘X, Y and Z were fraudsters,’ and we could lock them up and say we have sorted out the problem,” she points out. “But actually, it was a systemic issue. We all – and I include myself in this – we all subscribed to a certain world view, this vision of free markets and capitalism. What has shocked so many people is that we basically got it wrong. The underpinnings of capitalism were not as robust as we believed.” “If you look at many of the people involved in banks,” she continues, “say Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers – the people at the top were not selling shares, which is what you would expect if they were fraudsters. They were buying shares, they had massive
exposure – so many bankers had their life savings in Bear Stearns or Lehman. So, it was not the case that they were ripping off, or thought they were ripping off, investors. They drank the Kool-Aid. They believed their own hype.” Doyle thinks that in the UK the Conservatives are the right party to lead the country out of recession. I ask why she felt inclined to back them rather than Labour or the Lib Dems. Her reasons are two-fold, one being libertarian. “It was the Conservative party which stood up and said, ‘we do not believe in 90-day detention without charge,’” she says referring to the Labour party’s attempt to bring in a bill which would allow police to hold terrorist suspects for three months. Then, of course, there’s the economy. “If you grew up when I grew up in the '70s,” she says, “Britain was the sick man of Europe and then Margaret Thatcher came along and almost single-handedly brought in huge economic reform and spurred fundamental reform of the British economy.”
It is very tough to be the one person, the boy who says ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ It is very hard to judge market timing.” Margaret Doyle’s competence and intelligence have got her a long way since she left Trinity, and her Irishness has been an additional gift. At Harvard, students were rewarded for speaking in class. “That was not something which I found particularly onerous,” she says. “Irish people arguably are at a natural advantage.” Frieda Klotz is a freelance journalist currently living in New York. She studied Greek and English (TSM) at Trinity College before completing a doctorate in Greek literature at Oxford. Her first book, The Philosopher’s Banquet, co-edited with Dr. Katerina Oikonomopoulou, came out in June.
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